Time For an Update, Eh?!

Life has been slowly plodding along. 

I experienced my first blockage about 2 weeks ago. Thankfully, it was quite a small one and passed relatively quickly but was still very painful! Essentially, it felt like I was super full and really needed to pass gas or something but nothing was moving. But after sipping on some hot water and laying down, it passed... No ER visit for me that night thankfully! 

I saw my STN last week and it turned out my skin was reacting badly to the adhesive of the Coloplast bags I was using, so she wanted to try me on the Tre bags from Dansac. This was to try and stop the irritation but to also reduce the stinging I had around my stoma. 

Bag on the left: Coloplast 

Bag on the right: Dansac 

These new bags started off really well, after a week of using the Tre barrier rings with the Coloplast bag, the raw skin was already looking a hundred times better! That was until Saturday afternoon. I had the worst stinging pain I'd had so far and was unfortunately away from home.. So when I got home I went straight to change my bag. What I found was blood dripping down my tummy. The skin was sore and red and was stinging like crazy! Even after cleaning it up, it still hurt a lot. 

That night I had a bit of a melt down. After the positive reaction I'd gotten from my STN on Thursday, I felt pretty defeated to have it turn so bad after only 2 days. 

Thankfully, by Monday when I saw her again, it had started to heal up a bit again. 

Below is a picture of it on a relatively good day. 

Hopefully with a bit more persistence with these Tre rings and bags, it'll heal up even more! 

Even with the skin beginning to heal, we are still wanting to go down the reversal route as soon as possible. So today, I went to have a X-ray to check and see if the stitching in my J-pouch has healed. 

I went in to the room and got set up with a gastrografin enema which then showed up on the X-ray screens. 

This was such a weird sensation because the fluid literally went up and came straight out my bag 😂 you can see this in the 2nd and 3rd image. 

The doctor still has to take a closer look and write a report so I won't know the final results until I see a specialist in a few weeks time, but he said from a preliminary glance, everything looks OK! 

So fingers crossed that they say the same thing next time I'm in!