OstomyMan

When I first got my ostomy back in February, one of the main things I was told to be careful of was food blockages. I was told to make sure I chewed everything very well and I needed to be careful of fibrous foods like mushrooms and lettuce.

My wife and I were a little bummed because we are really big fans of mushrooms. So I behaved myself for a while and didn’t eat large quantities of fibrous foods. I tested the waters cautiously, but never really had a problem. So for almost a year, I happily chowed down on whatever I felt like eating. I did usually chew pretty well, so I guess I did well enough let everything digest well.

But then last week, I finally had my first experience with a blockage. It wasn’t an extreme case like I have read that many people have with excruciating pain, but it was annoying. I felt sort of sick to my stomach for most of the afternoon and evening. I didn’t want to eat anything. I tried laying down, but it didn’t do much good. I read that I should drink a lot, so I drank as much as I could.

And I read everything I could find on the internet about the symptoms of a blockage since I wasn’t sure that’s what was going on. I found the full range of suggestions from drink to go to the hospital. It didn’t do me much good and just made me worry.

I think I finally did drink enough and things were able to finally digest enough (I had gobbled some mushroom-laden stuffing earlier) to pass through. Once the blockage passed, I immediately felt better and was good to go again.

So, while my experience didn’t compare to others I have read about, it did remind me to chew better because it was quite unpleasant.

It’s been hot recently and so I have been wondering if I would have problems with my salt and potassium levels, since that can be a problem for some people with ostomies. One of the colon’s jobs is to absorb minerals and since I don’t have one anymore, I figured that could be a problem.

It’s also come up in one of my ostomy discussion groups lately. Some of the people have low potassium levels and so have to take pills and some are just fine. I think it goes to show how much have an osomy can vary from person to person.

Anyway, I’ve always known that the proper balance of salt and potassium is needed to handle hot weather or a lot of exertion well, since sweating can release it. And I know salt holds the water in the cells and that potassium helps it get out. So my plan of action over the past many years, though my colitis, is that if I noticed myself starting to get a bit puffy, or my skin starts to feel like it can’t “breathe”, I just took some potassium tablets. And that seemed to be enough for me. (Salt is very rarely a problem for me because I am a big salter of my foods–I really like the stuff).

That same principle seems to be working well for me with an ostomy. Ever since my surgery, I’ve been eating more bananas, just because I crave them slightly (and we always have a bunch of them around since my daughter really likes them also). I eat about one a day usually. And that seems to have pretty much handled any “potassium depletion symptoms”.

There have been a couple of days lately where it has topped 95+ degrees, and I started to feel that “swollen” feeling, so I just took about 500mg of potassium (just general store brand, nothing special) to “head it off at the pass”, and I was fine for the rest of the day.

While I had colitis there were a couple of things that I did that really helped me along. And though they didn’t cure me, they sure made life much more normal and helped put me into or maintain remissions if I didn’t screw around too long before doing them. Some of them lost their effectiveness for me, but they might be able to help someone else with the disease so I thought I would give them in a series. Here is the first one:

When I first got sick, I got hooked up with a chiropractor that had helped cure an ex-girlfriend of colitis years earlier. I followed his advice and actually turned things around and was in remission for several months before eating a bunch of celery and ripping things up a bit. His advice was to eliminate sugars and wheat entirely. And to take some of Dr. Shulze’s Intestinal Formula #2 (mixed with some other similar product with flax seeds that I can’t remember the name of) and Superfood That meant basically vegetables, meats and tofu. I couldn’t quite make it on this as I got too hungry between meals, so we modified it so that I had some grits (made of corn) for breakfast and I allowed myself apple juice to drink, corn chips as snacks and some all natural rye bread for toast and sandwiches.

He also recommended a stool test and then taking some herbs to handle whatever was found (the test I had done was at the Great Smokies lab in North Carolina, but I’ve heard they were bought out by another company and so aren’t very good anymore). The test I had found Klebsiella (I don’t know which exact kind) and the recommended “natural”, i.e. no prescription needed, handling was to take Uva Ursi. So I ended up taking some hydrochloric acid (basically stomach acid) to assist in my digestion, the Uva Ursi to handle the bug and then stuck to the diet very strictly.

I did all of this while weaning of the prednisone and sulfasalazine that the doctor had put me on. By the time I was done with those medicines, I was totally fine. Back to one bowel movement a day, back to my previous weight of about 135 and back to feeling well.

And like I said, this worked very well. I was able to work really hard at graduating and handle any and all stress with no problems. I only lost it when I unthinkingly took a ton of raw celery to work and ate it as a snack all day long and ripped things up some and started a period of ups and downs.

When I had ulcerative colitis, I tried just about everything anyone could think of to fix it, and I’m sure this is true of many people with that or similar diseases. I tried acupuncture, special diets, IV therapy, herbal treatments and tons of different vitamins and minerals and other supplements.

But each one didn’t handle the situation, so I would move on to the next one. And now that I am free from colitis, I have a entire shelf stuffed to the gills with these tons of partially used bottles of various supplements. A couple of them are just general vitamins or minerals that will be useful for me just as a general supplement or for my wife when she gets pregnant the next time (or maybe the next couple of times depending on how much I actually have left!). But I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the rest.

I was just going to start on a program of taking some of them each day and working my way through them all to use them up. I figured it couldn’t hurt as long as I didn’t go way overboard on one or another without balancing them out, but I have run into another problem: I don’t want to take any more pills at the moment!! I tried to take them. I have them all neatly put out for the next week in my pill organizer, but that was for a week a couple months ago, and they are still there. I have been religiously taking these supplements over the years and now that I don’t “have to”, I really don’t want to.

So now I’m stuck with a ton of these bottles and no where for them to go. It’s hundreds of dollars worth of supplements (if only we could have seen into the future to know what to buy and what not to buy), so I don’t really want to just throw them away. I think for now I will hold onto them. I will probably get over my disinterest in taking any pills some day, and then I’ll start working my way through them again. But in the meantime I have my shrine of bottles sitting on my shelf to commemorate my history with colitis.

I know some people have troubles with some foods with their ostomies, but I haven’t run into this yet (knock on wood). And that means that corn is back in. I have been able to eat corn on the cob twice so far this summer and creamed corn once–and summer has just started. My wife is huge corn fan, but in the past, she has had to make it just for herself. But now I’m feeling better and my daughter has gotten some teeth, so we are regularly having it.

And while my wife was away for a few days visiting her sister and our new nephew, I went to the movies twice and had popcorn! Not that I really needed or wanted it, but my step-dad always buys a large popcorn for a movie so he can refill it as many times as he wants, so I dove in and had some. It was good.

It’s pretty cool to go from not eating anything very “fibrousy” for nearly a decade to being able to eat whatever I want again.

I’ve never been a heavy guy. In fact, it’s been almost impossible for me to gain much weight. Ever since I was little, I’ve been skinny. I’ve never been much over 135, despite being almost six feet tall. And over the last few years, even during the “good” times, I haven’t been able to get over 115. I would just get to that and plateau out, no matter how much I ate.

But now I’m pushing 150. It’s a new problem. I’m going to have to buy new clothes and start exercising soon. I might even have to start watching how much I eat, since I now seem to be able to eat as much as I want. What a difference!

My doctor said that rapid weight gain was one of the things that you had to watch out for after getting an ileostomy as it could cause problems, but I thought it would never be something I would have to worry about. I guess he was right. I’m not worried about it being a problem since it’s not wildly out of control, but it’s sort of a fun new problem to have since it was always more of a problem the other way.

The nice thing about not having a colon is that eating beans isn’t a problem. I just thought of this the other day when we were having beans. They don’t have time to sit there and ferment. No farting. I’ve never had much of a problem with beans before, especially the last few years of having UC due to the transit time being so fast, but I just thought it was a funny thought.