Shit Happens.
I have had my ileostomy since 16 August 1998. I have an ileostomy, because I had a very bad case of ulcerative colitis that went undetected for too long. Maybe I shouldn't say undetected so much as undiagnosed. I knew there was something seriously wrong with me for quite a while, but being an over-achieving college student who lived in her head much more than her body I ignored my condition or wrote it off as stress, anxiety, hemorrhoids, poor diet, change in environment, and a whole lot of other rubbish.
Ultimately, I was hospitalized and my colon was removed. When I tell people about my surgery and my ostomy, they generally express such dismay and bafflement. Especially, as I'm usually pretty blasé about the whole thing and say something like "yep, they put me on the table and gutted me like a fish." Yeh, so I go for the shock value instead of the tasteful or pitiable. It's more to the point than going on about being sick in a foreign country, dealing with the UK health system, lying in bed for weeks, trying not to die on the flight home, looking like "an AIDS patient on the way out" (my dad) at the airport, talking to infectious diseases experts at the hospital, having some stupid heart doctor tell me my blood pressure's too high, undergoing batteries of tests and x-rays, swelling up from all the drugs, experiencing really scary mood swings. And then surgery. Surgery wasn't a big deal. It was, after all, the only solution. It also came with a post-op morphine drip, so it's not as if I was in the mood to mind.
From what I've read or heard from other ostomates, I feel I've had a fairly easy time with my ostomy. Oh, yes, it was pretty freaky in the beginning -- weird gurglings, frenetic output activity, inability to digest anything, gas, gas, gas, and (let's not forget) spontaneous leakage. Oh, and the fear I would never ever ever in a million years again have sex with the lights on. However, those are all standard "body adjusting to renovations" behaviors and went away fairly quickly. I also realized pretty quickly that given a choice between being dead or being alive with ostomy, I could put up with being alive.
If anything, I believe having an ostomy has given me a much stronger sense of my physical body, what it wants, and how it works than I ever had before. Oh, god, before I would have rather died than take a shit in a restroom. I am certainly less shy about bodily functions and physical needs than I used to be. Shit doesn't mortify me, anymore, but it can still annoy me.
Shit is a good word. While I use it a lot in this portion of my website, I am not trying to offend so much as trying to break down inhibitions. As ostmates, we spend a lot of time dealing with shit and we might as well get used to saying it. There's no room for squeamishness. Call things as they are.
Addendum.
Someone apparently read this portion of my site and somehow decided that ulcerative colitis is "just a lot of diarrhea." Obviously, I failed somewhere. Yes, it is a lot of diarrhea. A lot. This isn't a stomach bug or traveler's tummy. This isn't "oh, I'll take a day or two off from work and be fine for Thursday's business trip." This is your whole life redefined by the whims of your colon.
Ulcerative colitis occurs when your body for no reason as yet known to science decides to start rejecting portions of itself. In this case, the immune system goes on red alert and starts attacking the colon. Usually, the early symptoms are constipation with bloody or mucousy shit. Sometimes, you want to shit all the time, but very little comes out. You experience a lot of noise while trying to shit. Mucousy farts and tootling noises. Sounds like those made by nearly empty squeezable ketchup bottles. Murphy's Law being as it is, of course, the harder you try to repress them, the louder they are. Particularly, in quiet public toilets.
At some point, the diarrhea will get old and pain will arrive to liven things up. Sometimes it's only mild cramping. Other times, it's so bad that everything else ceases to exist. It's just little old broken you and the pain. Of course, pain doesn't like to party alone and so brings along it's jolly friends: severe fatigue, weight loss, lack of appetite, and fever.
If you're "lucky," drug therapy makes your case of ulcerative colitis more manageable. You eventually return to a normal life. If you're like The Husband, you get to experiment with all kinds of drugs before it's obvious that nothing short of an ileostomy is going to keep you going. Me, I got to skip all the drugs and go straight to the ileostomy thanks to a "toxic megacolon."