Low Anterior Resection life

I am slowly getting used to life with a bag. A colostomy bag. Friends who know now glance surreptitiously at my midriff. I have taken to always wearing baggy clothes which allow swift access to the bag in case of emergency. I never leave the house without a bag change kit consisting of wet wipes, a spare stoma bag, a pair of nail scissors to cut the hole on the skin-touching, sticky-back-plastic, part of the bag to encircle the stoma as snugly as possible and a little plastic rubbish sac. I sometimes also take a change of clothes, a bottle of water and a sachet of Dioralyte in case I get dehydrated – losing a foot of water-absorbing colon has that effect. I might also pack the enormous Radar key to unlock disabled toilets which the stoma supplies company sent me and a couple of the little sachets filled with a dehydrating substance which can be put inside the stoma bag to thicken up the output.

My cafe choices are now largely dictated by the accessibility of the customer toilets. You don’t get much warning when a bag’s sticky bit – it’s flange – is going to spring a leak. And if that happens, that can only mean needing to change it immediately. Stoma output is much more watery than a normal stool, and very corrosive as it is full of alkali bile salts. So, apart from anything else, it needs to be changed before the already-red skin around the stoma site gets so corroded by the output that sticking a new flange on will be impossible as it will be weeping and too moist for the glue to adhere.

The other thing with stoma bags is they can puff up very easily. I had had no idea how much gas lurked in the food I ate. It seems to defy the laws of physics. It shows as a huge bulge through my clothes and, more worryingly, if the gas can’t escape before the bag is stretched beyond its limit, there is a risk it will detach. It’s a problem. You do get a filter on the bags to address this, but I find they don’t always work that well. There are plenty of social media threads debating this problem. Some people burp their bags as discreetly as possible when this happens. My solution is to avoid eating while I am out.

A saving grace is that stoma supplies are free on the NHS. I am so relieved in this instance that I don’t live in the USA. There, where people with stomas who do not have any or the right health insurance have to pay for their supplies.

I read that the stoma bag was only invented in the mid-twentieth century. While I am sure stoma-creation would have been practically impossible before modern anaesthesia, which I guess was early twentieth century, I was still surprised to read that. A stoma bag is hardly hi-tech, and yet it wasn’t around for my grandparents’ peers as late as the interwar years of the first half of the twentieth century.