My Jour­ney of Pulling Through

It’s amaz­ing how com­fort­able I am now with my life with an Ostomy. I have come along way. Being 23 when I became severely ill and need­ing to go to hos­pi­tal, the thought of an Ostomy scared me so much that by the time I would let my self go, I was almost dead. So scared of hav­ing an Ostomy I did not know how I could ever go through life like that.

Another part of my prob­lem too was that I felt that going through with this kind of surgery would make me a fail­ure. Read­ing Louse Hay and all that self help stuff, I thought that what they were teach­ing was that if you can not heal your self, then you are a fail­ure. This mis­un­der­stand­ing added to my ill­ness with the bur­den of judg­ment on my self and oth­ers which in no way is ben­e­fi­cial to any one deal­ing with disease.

Now that I am older I have found that there is a fine line in this teach­ing around this and there are a lot of peo­ple con­fused. For me, I found that love and accep­tance of one self is really the Jour­ney. When I meet peo­ple who still are at the other point of the under­stand­ing and have this kind of judg­ment for them­selves and oth­ers, I know in my heart that they have not pulled through in their under­stand­ing of a Jour­ney, since this is where I started it is easy to accept them.

To all of you at the begin­ning of this Jour­ney, remem­ber it is actu­ally quite an inter­est­ing one. One day you will be amazed how com­fort­able you are with it all, maybe even thank­ful that you were given this to become the per­son you are today. I am.

S.