OstomyMan

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a few days now, but we are visiting family in Eastern Oregon now and my wife mentioning the cold toilet seat just pushed me over the edge.

I would like to file a formal complaint that the people that design toilets don’t know what they are doing. Sure they usually work fairly well and sometimes they have fancy features like “auto flush”, but come on. There’s so much more that could be done to make the toilet a more pleasure fixture in a house.

It seems obvious to me that the people that design toilets never had any kind of digestive problems nor were they big “toilet readers”.

Here are some of the problems that I see with toilets and some ideas about them:

• They get cold–We can heat floors in the dead of winter, but we can’t figure out how to make a toilet seat that doesn’t freeze you. The best alternative out there is a plastic one, but those often get scratched up and gross. I’m sure there are materials out there that are “warmer” and resistent to wear and tear.
• Some have too much water in the bowl and some have too little. The former can causes splashes and the latter can cause things put in the toilet not to be flushed down (especially when combined with a weak flush mechanism). This latter one is more of a problem for me now with my being “re-plumbed” and emptying in the front.
• They are usually too weak to conserve water or so strong they splash.
• Generally speaking, they aren’t all that pleasant to sit on.
• They are a real pain to clean–has anyone ever really stuck there head in to make sure that under the ring around the bowl is really clean?

That isn’t to say there aren’t ANY good toilets out there. I have seen a few. But they are very rare. I would think that a device that every human in the industrialized world uses should be better designed. I guess the companies that make them figure they have the market cornered. I’m sure there are ways to design the bowl to still keep the aesthetics and physics associated with the current designs on the outside and the inside to allow minimal water to flow around the entire bowl without splashing. And I’m sure there are more ergonomic designs for the seat.

Anyway, I’m just putting that out there as someone who has spent more than his fair share of time running for and sitting on toilets.

My wife was talking with her friend a while back about me having another kidney stone (hopefully just a hold over from the Prednisone) and he said something that I just found to be hilarious. He asked her something like “isn’t he like bionic more info

elimination man?” I thought that was great. I’ve humorously used “prosthetic colon” before about my ostomy bag, but I think I might switch to having a “bionic colon”. It probably doesn’t fit as precisely with the dictionary definitions, but it just sounds cool!

A while back my wife and I were joking about intestinal transplants. She has goats that she milks and a couple of them were butchered, so she was offering me goat intestines as a replacement for my missing colon. It was actually quite funny and I’ve had it on my list of things to blog about since then.

And then the topic of colon transplants came up on one of the Yahoo Groups that I am part of. It’s not a topic that I have researched at all, but I thought there were some interesting points brought up. One of them was that one of the problems with an intestinal transplant is all of the intestinal flora that differs from person to person. I hadn’t thought how that would be a problem.

Another interesting point was the amount of money and effort that’s put towards handling things like erectile dysfunction (otherwise known as “can’t get it up”) dwarfs the amount of money put towards diseases like Ulcerative Colitis and Chron’s and ways to handle them. Though I must admit that the attention and research has increased over the last few years.

Anyway, if they come up with a way, I’ve got a place I can get some goat intestines! Who knows, it may be how we make our fortunes–goat intestines to help those who are “intestinally challenged”!

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!