As I’ve mentioned before in the post titled The Accident, I was in a near-fatal car accident at the literal beginning of the year, well, five hours into it anyway.
One of the things I was “gifted” with from the drunk driver, was a colostomy bag when they had removed six inches of my colon due to damage from the high-speed impact.
The good news is that it’s only temporary and I can eventually have it reversed.
But it’s annoying to have and to deal with.
And, even though I have a cover that I wear over it whenever I go out in public, the extra bulge attached to the side of my stomach is still unsightly even covered and under a shirt.
The cover bunches it up and tends to give me “false alarms” about it’s being full but I still have to go and check and see if there is something there and then empty either the air or the solids.
The kind of colostomy bag I have technically has a small carbon(?) filter to allow the air to escape, but it’s rare for it to actually work as it clogs up and stays that way.
But, as with anything else in life, you get used to it. That doesn’t mean you dislike it any less, it just means that you just go “take care of it”.
Whether feeding a pet, taking out the garbage, changing a diaper, loading the dishwasher, emptying or replacing a colostomy bag, you just do it.
I’m writing this a few days after I thought of writing more about my accident and I have forgotten what my original point was going to be, but I wrote anyway.
It’s nice to still be alive, and as with most things, there’s a little bad in with the good.
Or a little good in with the bad if you tend towards the more pessimistic perspective.
There’s the [mildly] entertaining aspect that every once in a while, I look down and see a hole in the incision and I think, “did I get another abscess that opened up in the incision?” only to realize that I am looking, once again, at what is left of my bellybutton because it looks so different now.
And I have a cool-looking scar in the shape of a cross on my belly, so I’ve got that going for me.