LIFE WITH AN ILEOSTOMY.
Some Personal Experiences

Once, only a few months after my operation, I was  at a motorway service station where there were temporary toilets in a portacabin, and the door to each closet opened onto the world.  Naturally, the door locks didn't work. There I was, doing what I had to do when a man opened the door, exposing me to the world.  He mumbled his apologies and beat a hasty retreat.

When I  had a contract as a computer technician in a school, I was attending a meeting to discuss the renewal of my contract.  All was proceeding in a friendly and satisfactory manner. A couple of the people there knew about my alternative plumbing, but the School Headmaster was only aware that I'd had some sort of surgery.  Iwas wearing light trousers.
All of a sudden, one of the teachers present (who knew all about Vesuvius), as discretely as she could, pointed out that my right trouser leg was slowly but surely turning brown.  For the first (and so far only) time, my bag had started leaking badly in public.  I had to make my rapid apologies as best I could.  Although I carry a spare bag, I didn't have any spare trousers on me and had to drive home, dirty, to change.
The contract was still renewed.

Just recently, I have been having a lot of trouble with leakage at night.  In Spain, it's the pharmacist you normally turn to for advice - they are often more knowledgeable about ostomy appliances than the doctors. So I went to see Joana, my pharmacist, and we spent about twenty minutes discussing things in a mixture of her limited English and my limited Spanish, resorting at times to diagrams to explain just where and how the leaks were occurring. Because I feel so at ease with her, there was no false modesty, and graphic descriptions.  When, eventually, we looked up (she was about to make a phone call to the Braun office in Barcelona), we realised that there were by now at least half a dozen people in the Farmacia, all listening intently! Nobody said a word, but they all smiled at me knowingly! At least six more people on the Costa Blanca now understand the basics of an ileostomy.

JHaving lived in Spain for ten years now, I am well established on the Spanish National Health System.  So I shouldn't have been surprised to receive an invitation (sent out, I presume, to everybody in my age range) to participate in a bowel cancer screening program involving a faeces sample and rectal examination.  Perhaps I should have let them try!

Finally, but not so funny, soon after surgery, I had to have a medical examination for benefit payment purposes (this was when I was still in the UK). The doctor's first words were "Now is your colitis".  He was most unamused by my reply of "Fine, thanks, seeing as how I no longer have a colon".