Cancer 106

Life’s shit, part two. It was a bad day for my stoma yesterday. I had three serious leaks, more than ever before. A leak is embarrassing. Imagine walking around in public and suddenly, without warning, faeces emerge over your stomach, leaking from a bag, and oozing around the sides of your support belt. I don’t have to imagine it. It gets on my shirt, on my trousers, on my support belt. I need to wear the belt so I have to wash it off and put it back on wet. I have to hope my clothes are not too bad as I am often not in a position to get changed. Fortunately, two leaks took place at the house last night so I could get changed.

The stoma is in a bit of a mess. It is bleeding quite badly. This is fairly normal. The blood comes and goes. It is just that yesterday everything seemed to come at once, and it was diarrhoea. That is at least partly a function of the time point after last week’s chemotherapy, so I took painkillers and anti-diarrhoea tablets.

The whole thing is rather unpleasant.

It came to a bit of a crisis last night. I am stuck with the problem of having to wear a belt to try and keep my hernia under control but the belt itself squashes the stoma bag which means it is far more likely to leak. Last night I started to think I shouldn’t be out in public, that I can’t cope with it all anymore. It took me longer than usual to settle and get my head around everything. When I did get to sleep I had a dream all about the complexity of changing my stoma, changing my belt, and trying to stop the leakages. It was one of those disturbing dreams that stays with you when you wake, and then you realise the dream is just reflecting real life.

I have an additional problem with the stoma. Being colourblind I can’t tell the difference between the colour of the stoma itself (the gut), the faeces, and the blood. It means that when the stoma is open I have to look carefully to see what is emerging. Most people can probably tell the difference between these various browns and reds and it must make life much easier.

And there we have joys of being a cripple, especially one with all this intersectionality between heart failure, cancer, stoma, hernia, gout, colourblindness, lefthandedness, an itchy PICC line, a touch of neuroticism and being a white heterosexual male. I’ll get over it.