My Colostomy

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It was the week before thanksgiving and I started to have some pain in my lower left abdomen area. No biggie. I have had some pain there before and it always went away. More importantly I had a party to go to. No time for pain. It had actually been hurting for the week before, but I don’t complain much so no one really noticed. I partied like a rockstar as I usually do and got to my friends house about 3am and went to sleep.I woke up around 8am in massive pain. I was told to go to the doctor. The emergency room in fact. “No thanks. I’ll be fine”, I said. I don’t need a stupid doctor….

So the next day I wake up in massive pain. OK, Ill go to the doctor. I call and they squeeze me in. A doctor I have never seen cause I haven’t been to the doc in years. He tells me I have Diverticulitis. HA! I don’t think so. I’m only 39. I don’t have that old person’s disease. No way.. He tells me I should feel better in a couple of days. He gives me some prescriptions and I am off to the pharmacy.

Two days later, guess what? I feel really bad. I mean REALLY bad. But It will go away I tell myself. It doesn’t. 3am rollsa round and I decide, OK. I should probably go to the emergency room. So I get a ride down there and they check me in.

At this point I feel like an elephant is standing on my stomach. I have been run over by cars, flipped out of jeeps, wrecked on motorcycles, yet I have never been in this much pain. Something must be wrong.

They do a CT scan and tell me I have an abscess in my colon and it doesn’t look good.

So they decide they need to operate to fix the problem. Yee-Haw! They did put me on some more antibiotics telling me that they might help. I just think they wanted me to stay a few extra days to pad the hospital bill, but who knows for sure. Anyway, a few days after they found the abscess, they are telling me I need surgery that will result in the colostomy. At this point I really didnt care too much what they did.

The surgeon came in and told me the news, surgery resulting in a colostomy bag was the only option. If things went well, we could do a resection in 90 days or so. OK, Can I have another shot of Demerol first?

I think it was saturday morning at about 3am when they were finally preparing to cut me open and remove 8″ of my colon. At this point, I was so high on the drugs that I didn’t care what they did or what they removed. I just wanted it to be over and to be out of pain. They wheeled me in to surgery. Last thing I remember is trying to count backwards from 10 and trying to make it all the way to 1. I think I made it to about 8…

I don’t even remember being in recover. Next thing I know I am in a luxurious private room.

I wake up in the hospital after having the colostomy surgery done and I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would. Of course I am still on lots of pain medications. I had to stay in the hospital after the colostomy surgery for about 6 days. It was a lot of laying around doing nothing. I did get a morphine pump for the pain. WOOHOOO!

During the hospital stay, a nurse came in to show me how to use the colostomy supplies they had given me. You have to stick a removable bag over the stoma to catch your bodies waste. Talk about fun. Just what I want, a bag to collect my shit. My friends starting calling me “shit-bag” or “semi-colon”. Good friends…

During the next three months, things were pretty much back to normal. I am in outside sales, so I was able to still do my normal job. I just couldn’t lift anything heavy for about 6 weeks.

After 3 months, I went back to the doctor for a follow up visit. Luckily everything was healing nicely so they were able to schedule me for the colostomy reversal.

Back to the hospital i go! I checked into a new hospital in town and prepared for the reversal. I have never been so excited to have someone cut me open.

They knocked me out with some quality drugs and once again i woke up in a recovery room. The pain was even less this time. I just felt a little sore. Basically they cut the stoma loose and pull it back inside then re attach it to the bowel. They use a titanium ring and a special surgical stapler to hold it all together. Pretty advanced stuff. I was only in the hospital this time for about 4 days. They have to make sure everything is holding up and you don’t have any leaks or infections. I did good.

Once this was done, I was back home to rest and take it easy for another week. It took about 6 weeks for me to feel really normal again. It has now been over 6 months since the colostomy reversal and I feel great!

This is a picture of the stoma. It is the result of a colostomy. They actually take your intestine and pull it out of your body and stitch it to you. Then you cover it with a colostomy bag.

This is the cut they made in the middle of my stomach to remove the intestine that was abcessed. You can see the colostomy bag covering the colostomy.

Here is what is left after they reversed the colostomy.