Let’s all be a little honest right now – life is pretty tough. No matter who you are or what you do, you’re going to be met with a whole array of problems that will just need to be solved as you go at them. Now I am a person with lots of life experiences, and I can say from firsthand experiences that some problems are worse than others. If you have had an ostomy and are living with the new addition of stoma, you’ve clearly already had some pretty serious problems.
However, today I am writing about the possible subsequent problems that can occur when you are living with a stoma. Most people become more familiar with their stoma overtime and are able to tell when things are not exactly going well. However, I know that some people out there could be dealing with some fairly serious stoma problems and not even know it. Hopefully I’ll be able to address a few mainstream problems that can happen for ostomates, and also bring up some new ones that you may not know about.
The most notorious and probably most common problem for people with stomas is when the ostomy bag starts to leak somehow. There is nothing worse than stinking up an entire room with the odor of your bowel movements because there is a bad seal on your skin barrier, or the ostomy pouch is not functioning properly. While there are a few different reasons for ostomy pouch leakage, a lot of them can be attributed to the size of your stoma changing here or there after surgery or with weight gain and loss.
If the size of your stoma is changing, it is important to change your ostomy pouch size as well so that you can prevent leakages that way. An ostomy pouch that does not fit you well will also cause some discomfort with your stoma, and nobody wants that. Also, keep in mind that it is imperative to clean out your stoma thoroughly before putting your new ostomy pouch on. (Don’t forget to dry it off as well!).
Another problem that is pretty common is ballooning, which basically means that your ostomy pouch is getting completely filled by gas. This is a super frustrating problem because it means that you have to spend more time and energy trying to change your pouch more frequently. Nobody wants to deal with this, and you especially don’t want to have the people around you smell the gas leaking out of you through an ostomy pouch.
So the main way that you can avoid ballooning is to avoid foods that make you gassy. In most cases, foods that made you gassy before getting a stoma put in will likely still make you gassy now; the difference is that people with stomas cannot control the output of their gas, and therefore it becomes more important to be careful with the amount of gas that you are allowing to be created in your body. Avoiding certain foods like cabbage, cauliflower, beans, and chewing gum is a good step to take to avoid a lot of gas on a regular basis.
Other things that you can avoid include chewing gum and drinks with a lot of carbonation. Those things will also cause more gas in your system and lead to your ostomy pouch ballooning up.
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