My Pet Stoma

Mrs C, like 75% of the general population who has chosen to eat processed food and grainless bread and pastas, whose concept of fruit is something like Sunny D orange juice, and whose idea of vegetables is canned peas and baby corn, has diverticula disease. This is The disease of the modern world. A world that can afford to grind their grain down to nothing and where pizza is a main food group, with olives standing in for roughage. It is basically a pooping problem, or an accumulation of years of straining to poop until the eyeballs pop out of the socket. Over the years, the ass settles into the couch until there is a dent and the stomach shelves out so there is a place to put that favorite can of soda. Over the years, the colon is subjected to constant forces as Macdonald's and KFC make their way out of the digestive system with more difficulty than they would desire. And little by little, the walls weaken where blood vessels enter. And eventually, they start to bulge outwards into the abdominal cavity where bits of what once were Whoppers and Bacon Double cheeseburgers get caught in these blind pouches, which can number into the hundreds, and erode a blood vessel or worse yet, get stuck permanently and give you the wickedest stomache known to man. Such attacks come and go as the body takes care of the local infection but what can happen is that occassionally, an eroded blood vessel doesn't want to stop bleeding or the pouch gets so heavy that it bursts, spilling remnant Chilli Cheese Fries and Chicken Fried Steaks into the inside of your abdomen. This is really bad doo doo (in more ways than one) and can land you in a hospital, very very sick.

Mrs C had one too many of those wickedest stomaches known to man with bleeding that won't stop and developed a bad infection so we went in and whacked out the left side of her colon. However, it wasn't safe to put her colon back together so a hole was made on the side of her abdomen and a bit of her colon was pulled through to the outside. This is a colostomy, we affectionately also call a "stoma", and a bag that goes on the outside of that is a colostomy bag.

I had the utter pleasure of changing this bag today. Fortunately for me, it was empty.

As the old bag came off and the new one put on, Mrs C glanced at her stoma, naked for the first time, and eeked!
"It's so strange looking," she said, starring at the beefy red mouth at the side of her tummy. "How bizarre."
And very thoughtfully she added:"The implications of having a colostomy bag just hit me."
For a brief moment, she looked sad.

"I know what you can do," I said, trying to think of a quick way to distract her.
"You can give it a name."
"What a great idea!"
She then looked at me trepidatiously.
"You won't be offended if I named it after you, would you?"
"You want to name your stoma Edna?"
Seriously now. I was thinking more on the lines of "Squirt", which would have been far more appropriate.
"Why not, since you're the first to change the bag."
Well, blimme.

As we rounded with the attending and the chief resident that day, I hear the usual attending speak; congratulatory tone; about how we will watch and see how things are and how good Mrs C is doing after her operation and how well she looks.
"We'll have to wait," he said. "Hopefully, Edna will open up and things will start moving along."

I've been known to be full of shit and have bouts of verbal diarrhea once in a while but this pet stoma is putting it a little too literally.