Liv­ing with an Ostomy

Becom­ing Friends with Your Body

In our heal­ing from Ostomy surgery becom­ing friends with our new body is part of the heal­ing process. Except­ing this new body image helps us heal and move on. We all go through the process, this is what life’s about. We always hear “life is a jour­ney” and it really is. Going through an ill­ness like Crohn’s and col­i­tis, is a journey.

The first part of our jour­ney we go through denial. We know something’s wrong, but don’t really tell any­one, we are often con­fused and don’t really under­stand what’s going on. Denial can only last so long as with the blood in the stool, and the other symp­toms we know are not nor­mal. As a symp­toms per­sist in the pain starts to take over our lives, we tell some­one or seek out a doc­tor. This part can often be frus­trat­ing as well, as the process of being diag­nosed can be long and treacherous.

Now, we’ve been diag­nosed, now we have a name for our prob­lem. This part is the poor me stage, blame stage, feel­ings of help­less­ness and anger. At this part of our jour­ney we come to real­ize that we do have a prob­lem, but it’s not our fault. We blame the world, the doc­tors, and we feel like a victim.

To get through this stage, we need to accept our­selves. Whether or not, this is good or bad, right or wrong, is irrel­e­vant it is, and we need to accept that. This is the body we have, this is the life we have. Once we accept this we can move forward.

This is a piv­otal point on this jour­ney, we can sit and wait in this place of blame, frus­tra­tion and anger or we can choose to make this a new oppor­tu­nity to move forward.

When we are in pain it’s eas­ier to sit in this place of blame, rather than choose to move for­ward, because the pain blocks or abil­ity to think clearly. Not really know­ing how much pain we are in, and that we are not think­ing clearly, we tend to linger in this poor me stage for a while.

Until my surgery, I was stuck in this place of blame. I had Crohn’s dis­ease for 12 years, before my surgery, and never once knew how much pain I was in. After my surgery, I real­ized how much pain I had been in for the past 12 years. Because this pain creeps up on us over the years, we do not under­stand the level of pain we are in. Being in pain all the time we tend to go through life a lit­tle tense, a lit­tle on edge and feel­ing frus­trated, mak­ing it hard to move forward.

When we are in pain all the time, it’s hard to heal the emo­tional part of us. After I had my large bowel removed I was finally pain free, what a relief. Now I was able to look for­ward in life.

Start­ing to accept my body the way it was, I started to see my Ostomy as a gift and became thank­ful for it. The fact that we can pull the small bowel through the abdom­i­nal wall to even have a stoma amazed me, never mind, it never becom­ing infected. This amaze­ment led me to a new respect for my body. We were now becom­ing friends.

Sheri