5

There Are So Many Ways For It To Embarrass You

Once you take your butt and its attendant muscles out of the equation, you suddenly have no control over when you poop and fart. And that pouch is flimsy.

"If you can't get to a restroom to empty it quickly, then you're looking at a leak/explosion situation," Kayleigh says. Although she never had to face a poop-bomb scenario ("oh thank god for that!"), she "did have a couple of leaks, and I can't even begin to explain the utter panic!"

Unlike the normal-butted, who always have the option of speed-walking to the restroom and throwing out their underwear when a burrito breaks bad, "there's literally nothing you can do about that if you don't have [the supplies you need to] change it."

All you can do is sit there and pray for the bowel gods to take pity on you.

It always seems to happen at the worst times, too: "Once was when I was waiting for a doctor's appointment, and I realized I could smell something not nice, and it was because I still hadn't quite got the hang of changing the bag by myself, and I hadn't secured it well enough," Kayleigh says. "I was just sat there, willing my body to just not do this to me, and trying to press the bag onto my tummy so it didn't just totally peel off."

After that, she learned to carry her supplies around with her, but "another time, I was in the middle of a university lecture when I felt the bag literally inflating with what can only be described as gas," she continues. "Even under a loose shirt, it was really noticeable, like you'd have thought I was going to float away carried by the thing, so I didn't want to jump up and draw attention to myself. So I just sat there praying I could get to the end of the lesson and make it to a bathroom before it popped. It actually burst as I got into the toilet cubicle, but luckily it was only full of air!"

And even more luckily, newer models offer a "burp" feature.

4

It Affects Your Life In So Many Little Ways

When most of us get dressed in the morning, the only question we have about our butts is whether or not they look big enough to warrant a rap song. Kayleigh had more pressing concerns.

"Clothes shopping is a nightmare!" she says. "Colostomy bags come in various sizes, but you can forget about wearing a fitted dress or a T-shirt if you don't want everyone to see the outline."

They don't make sexy belly-thongs.

"I didn't even think about wardrobe at first, because I was in hospital in PJs for about a month," Kayleigh explains. "It was only when I got home and people were coming over, and I was trying to make more of an effort to not look ill, and I went to chuck a T-shirt on, and went 'oh goddddddd', because you could just see the bag, and I couldn't get the shirt all the way over it! At that moment, I started frantically pulling everything that I owned out, and had to ditch most of it for either being too tight, or too short to cover the whole bag."

Her whole wardrobe had to be overhauled, "from fitted dresses and shirts to looser or baggy clothing," she says. "I bought a load of looser, longer shirts, and had to get some low-waisted jeans, because the high-waisted ones were just impossible."

3

You Won't Be Able To Eat Much Of Anything

When a large section of intestines is taken out of the picture, the ability to digest certain foods goes with it. Diet was just one more thing Kayleigh had to completely reconfigure.

"You'd be shocked by the amount of food you can't eat at all, or have to take 'great care' eating," she says. "You can't have steak unless you literally chew the meat to a pulp before you swallow it. You have to peel fruit, especially apples, because you can't swallow the skin. Nuts? Absolutely not! Hazelnut caramel chocolate bars were my favorite, so I was devastated!"

"The reason is because certain things can cause obstructions in (what you have left of) the bowel, because those are the bits that would get broken down in the bit of intestine that your food no longer reaches," she explains. "If you get a bowel obstruction, then you could be looking at another major operation to fix it." She notes that "this actually happened to me, but because of scar tissue and not tricky food."

When you cut out meat, fruit, nuts, and seeds, you're left with ... salad? Better hope you don't run into a renegade raisin. Bread? Not the healthy kind, with thick crust and seeds.

"You don't realize how many things have seeds and/or nuts until you're absolutely not allowed them, and then suddenly you see that they're in loads of things," Kayleigh says. That probably didn't help her weight loss -- you can't eat much if, well, you can't eat much -- but the embarrassment factor was a key consideration here, too, turning every meal into dietary calculus.

"I became very aware of what foods tended to get digested faster," Kayleigh says. "For me, if I was eating out anywhere, I completely avoided anything with gravy and most sauces, because otherwise the colostomy bag was prone to just suddenly ballooning."

She's just full of interesting food facts like that. Invite her to your parties!

2

Your Sex Life Becomes ... Complicated

Most of us won't even poop in the same house as a new sexual partner, from anywhere between the first several weeks to ever. Imagine having to do it in their face, depending on the position.

1

You Might Be Able To Poop Again Someday. It Will Be Weird.

Did you know colostomies can be reversed?

"Basically, I needed the colostomy in the first place because it was my large bowel that was damaged, so they fitted the stoma while it was healing, to take all pressure off digestion in that area," Kayleigh explains. "I was lucky that I wasn't so damaged that I healed well enough to have the reversal, otherwise it would have been permanent."

So now she's back to her normal-poopin' self. Well, mostly.

"That very first poop, after not pooping at all for like six months or something, that was really, really weird," she says. "Those poops were like teeny and white. They did warn me that might be the case, because it would be likely that there had just been some sitting in there the entire time, just waiting to come out and they'd like, I don't know, sort of crystallized?"

But it's one thing to be told that and quite another to see it staring out at you from the toilet.

Once she got over that initial shock, there was a new problem to contend with: "It was quite hard to go at all, for a couple of months, because I hadn't exercised those particular muscles in months, and had no abdominal strength because I was still recovering from all the surgery, so the struggle was something akin to Thor fighting Loki every time I went to bathroom."

"The only real difference that I've noticed since the reversal -- and I have absolutely no explanation for this -- is that I now have zero tolerance for alcohol," Kayleigh says. Before and after she had the colostomy, she drank like any other student -- that is to say, extremely well -- but since the reversal, she gets "absolutely smashed after half a glass of wine now, or if I stop drinking before even being drunk, I'm hungover for about three days after, so I just don't drink at all anymore -- because it's not worth it! I'm not sure that I can medically prove that's the reason, but I'm 100 percent sure that it's something to do with it, because this wasn't the case before!"

If we needed another reason to continue pooping from the designated hole, there it is.

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