OstomyMan

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.

This may be a bit of a crude topic, but being the kind of guy that I am, I’ve come up with a problem that I’m guessing most ostomates never even worry about. What to call what comes out of me? I’m a writer and I like to understand words and to use them correctly, but I so far haven’t been able to find the proper word for whatever it is that ends up in my ostomy bag.

It’s definitely not s*&t, crap, poop, caca or any of the other names for a normal person’s feces. And it’s not “chyme”, that’s the food after it’s been digested in the stomach and first enters the intestine. I guess it could be “effluence”, stuff that flows out, but that seems sort of silly.

Anyway, I’m going to keep looking to see what I can come up with. Otherwise, I’m going to take this opportunity to coin a new word!

Over the past several years I wasn’t doing very well. And as such, I lost a lot of weight and my clothes were very loose. My pants that had fit properly before were getting quite loose so that I pretty much had to wear a belt to keep them up. (It actually made going to the bathroom every few hours much easier since I didn’t have to unbutton my pants, but could just push them down.) I actually started to think that one pair of pants must have just been really large to start with because they were really large. But as I got sicker and sicker, I cared less and less how I looked so I didn’t really buy any new clothes.

But now that I am gaining my weight back and am passing the 150 mark, I’m going to have to start shopping again as a bunch of my clothes don’t fit any more. And I am back to caring what I look like, so I guess soon I’ll be visit a clothes store to pick up some new things. I guess what I have would be in style as they actually “fit”, but they are sort of tight and the shirts only come past my belt line by an inch or two. And that’s not very workable when I’m not into advertising my ileostomy bag. So I’ll be shopping for some new shirts that are a little larger and loose fitting. And if I gain any more weight, I’ll be shopping for some new pants with an increased waistline.

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.

Welcome to OstomyMan.com. My name is Jared and I’m just getting started on this blog. I had Ulcerative Colitis for nearly a decade before I decided to have a colectomy and an ileostomy. While I had Ulcerative Colitis, I can honestly say that I tried just about everything to get and keep it under control. It worked off and on for quite a while, but it finally became too much once I had a baby (March 2007) and things really showed their true colors. I had pushed too long and too far without getting the situation handled, so now it was time to terminatedly handle it so that I could get back from the zombie like state of lethary and become a useful, productive member of society, a pleasant husband and an active dad.

When I was deciding whether or not to have the colectomy and the ileostomy, I found that there wasn’t a whole lot of information available about the day-to-day effects of having that surgery. The nurse gave me a book to read (Alive and Kicking by Rolf Benirschke), which did give me some idea and I really appreciated reading it. And after I had my surgery, I joined a couple of Yahoo groups on the topic and that has been very helpful too. But I didn’t find these things until the very end of my Ulcerative Colitis and after my surgery.

So I thought I would try to help fill the void for anyone that might be going through Ulcerative Colitis or facing a potential ostomy (whether ileostomy or colostomy). I figured I would let people know what I had tried, what I had figured out, what’s going on and how things continue to go in the future. It’s just going to be my experiences (and anyone else I have post), but I think it might be useful to someone facing these unpleasant situations and looking for real, down-to-Earth specifics. Hopefully it will help shed some more light on these areas.

P.S. I’m just getting this blog up and running, so there will be some structural changes or the next little while as I get it set up how I would like it.