Adventures in Surgery: Colostomy to Ileostomy

Back in February of this year, I was told that it was time to remove my colon. I knew that this would eventually happen and if I look at the big picture, I had a pretty good 5 years between major surgeries.

Mentally I had to prepare myself for the recovery because it’s not easy. Due to the complicated nature of my disease, I’ve never been able to have laparoscopic surgery and have always had to have a major abdominal incision. It is a very painful recovery.

I remember waking up from the anesthesia and feeling the pain. Typically I receive Dilaudid for pain, but it’s manufactured in Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria destroyed the factory. So Dilaudid was in short supply. The morphine wasn’t cutting it.

Overnight, I couldn’t sleep. The pain was too much. I could barely move. My nurse was great and kept checking on me and trying to find ways that he could help. By the time the doctors came for their morning rounds, I was crying and told them they need to do something about the pain meds.

Physical Therapy came around to get me up and I declined their services that first day. I was exhausted from being up all night in pain and told them they could drag me out of bed tomorrow, which they did.

With most surgeries I’ve had, it got better slowly each day. My surgeon expected me to be in the hospital over 8 days, but I was discharged by day 6. Once your bowels are operational again and you can tolerate solid food, they send you home.

This was a difficult recovery at home because Florida has a new law that restricts doctors prescribing pain medications. They cannot prescribe more than 3 days worth of pain medication. Typically I use about two weeks supply of pain meds because the abdominal incision is so large. Having to ration my pain pills was brutal, I shouldn’t have had to suffer. Pain is no joke.

The first week home I couldn’t get out of bed without taking something, which was scary watching my pill supply dwindle down. Every day I would go for a walk down the hall in my apartment building. Each day I would go a little further. It’s crazy to think I barely had the energy to walk 50 feet, but that’s one of the many struggles you deal with during recovery. My heating pad was constantly on to help with the pain, especially since I had to ration my pills.

Overall the ostomy adjustment wasn’t a problem. I was already an experienced ostomate, this was just a new stoma. Thankfully it wasn’t too close to my incision so I had no issues sealing the ostomy bag as I’ve experienced in the past.

Slowly my appetite started to come back and I was beginning to feel like myself again. I predicted it would take about a month to get back to my normal, and I was right. Except I couldn’t predict the unexpected abscesses that would soon wreak havoc on my body the day before I was supposed to go back to work. More on that in another post to come.