Starting the New Year with a Bang

We are five days into the new year, 2014, and I have started it with a bang.  How about y’all?

There are some old traditions in the southern United States and I enjoy keeping them.  This year, I decided that Moxie wasn’t going to stop me from enjoying my traditional New Year’s Day meal for luck and money.  I cooked ham, hoppin’ John, greens and made a banana split dessert.  Hoppin’ John, for those of you who don’t know, is blackeyed peas, rice, cheese, spices and some add tomatoes.   The saying goes, “eat poor on New Year’s, eat fat the rest of the year.”  The greens represent bills, the blackeyed pea’s coins; ham is the cheapest of meats.  And if you have an ostomy or IBD, then you know that all this food is seriously dangerous!  I was playing with fire.    My boys make fun of this traditional dinner every year while my husband and I enjoy it.   I took some simethicone before I ate the hoppin’ john and only had a few bites of the greens but still had my New Year’s Day dinner.  More simethicone before bed and thankfully, I woke up during the night when Moxie’s bag was blown up like a balloon with NO explosions.  Dinner successfully done, maybe I am starting to learn how to eat a few more things and manage.

The past few weeks have been painful, however.  My joints, back and guts have hurt.  On New Year’s Eve, you could actually feel a hard knot just below my belly button on the left side in my abdomen.  The output from my ileostomy seemed perfectly normal so I had no reason to be worried about a partial blockage.  Nothing that looked like a hernia, either, just this hard spot you could feel that was also sore to the touch.  By Thursday, I think I discovered the cause.

When you have a colectomy and keep your rectum, if someone doesn’t tell you that you will pass mucus, it will come as a big shock the first time you have the urge to “go” again when you know that you are no longer connected.   Well, the past few days, I had another shock.  I have not only had the urge to “go” passing nothing but mucus but I’ve had that urge as frequently as if I were having diarrhea again.  Sometimes something happens, and a lot of it, other times it does not.  And there was actually a time that I could not get there fast enough.  Let me tell you, I was so shocked that I wasn’t sure what to do!

I have an ileostomy!  I do not pass poo!  Yet here I have been the past few days, actually running to the bathroom because something was going to come out.  It can happen.  My abdomen is no longer so sore and the knot is no longer as hard, either.  However, my poor rear was so raw by Saturday I was actually looking for something to put on it.  With no poo coming out of it!   Never did I dream that mucus could constipate a person, break free and give you diaper rash.

I’m guessing this is not a normal circumstance and from the looks of things I probably could use an antibiotic.  When I have my insurance information again, giving the doctor a call will probably be a good idea.  I had to change and haven’t received any of the new information yet, but that’s another post.  I think I’ll call it . . .  Open Enrollment.

Life is never boring, that’s for sure.