OstomyMan

I figured I’d take the opposite tack with this post since I don’t have everything figured out about how to extend wear time, but I have figured some things that seem to reduce the number of days each of my bags lasts.

First off, I should start out with reiterating that I use one-piece bags for a number of reasons, but basically because I like them better and have had better success with them.

So here’s my list of not-to-dos if I want my bag to last longer:

1) Let the bag fill completely with gas. Basically this builds up the pressure and the seal is going to be the weakest link, so even if it doesn’t cause a blow out or a leak, it can weaken the seals hold by letting the liquids start to get under.

2) Wear tight clothing across the bag. This seems to happen to me more when I wear jeans than anything else, but if I wear my jeans and belt too tight, the contents of the bag are trapped at the top and seem to wear away at the seal and so the bag doesn’t last as many days.

3) Play with my 1 1/2 year old daughter a bunch. This one isn’t something I’m willing to avoid, but I’ve noticed that when my wife and daughter are away visiting family or I go out of town for business, my bags tend to last longer. I can only assume this is because my daughter loves to jump on my lap and be held and that these pull on my clothes and thus pull on the bag and weaken the seal.

4) Get a bad batch of bags. This one isn’t really avoidable since you don’t know you get a bad batch until you get them. I’ve read online that you can usually call up the company and get them to replace the batch of bags for free, but I haven’t tried this yet, since I have only experienced this twice. The first time I had no clue and I’m just now figuring out that this last batch is in fact not holding up well.

5) Extreme sports. I went white water rafting and basically had my bag fall off so that I was holding it on for the last part of the trip. That wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but since then I’ve learned that there’s water proof tape and I’ve come up with some other ideas, so I’m definitely not planning to let this be a stop to me having fun.

I’m sure I’ll learn more ways to screw up with my bags and to make the wear out faster, but I think those are the main ones I have come up with so far.

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.