A Bag For Life?

Operation is scheduled for the 1st of July.  Pre-op checks done this week and just an appointment with the surgeon on Monday and we are good to go.

Whatever the outcome of the surgery is, I will have a new attachment to contend with post-operation.  Nothing fancy, like a whisk or one of those narrow pipes that goes on the end of the vacuum hose to help get down the back of the sofa.   The hope is that once the nice lady surgeon has taken the section of my bowel out where the tumour is, she can reconnect my bowel.  If she can I will have an ileostomy, which is a temporary diversion of the upper bowel out through my tummy in to a bag.  Apparently, the output is akin to porridge, shitty porridge that is.  This will stay with me for two to three months, whilst the reconnected bowel heals and reaches the stage where it can resume its former duties with gusto.

The alternative is that I have a colostomy which will be my new ‘bag for life’.  No more disappointed looks from the supermarket checkout assistant when they ask me if I ‘brought my own bag?’.  A quick lift of the t-shirt and a flash of my special attachment will surely silence her or him and earn me a few extra points on the loyalty card.  Perhaps I will also see an end to the delays in the self-checkout and the cry of ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’.  That’s not an unexpected item, I’ve been expecting that since that chicken jalfrezi went down the hatch.

The two pictures show the latest fashion in bags.  Grey is the colostomy bag and the skin coloured one is for the ileostomy.  The ileostomy bag is reused once you have emptied the shitty porridge, whilst the colostomy bag is disposed of.

Either way, the addition of my own special attachment has got to be better than carrying around a bum tumour.