The founder of
the site |
Hello
everybody =) I am the person who set up
Stomaatje. My name is Eliene, I am 28 and
have had a stoma since 8 March 2004, an
ileostomy, in fact. This is a stoma which is
sited on the small bowel so I no longer
use my large bowel. Even before I had my stoma,
I felt that I wanted to do something more: I
wanted to make having a stoma into something
positive. Because at the time I was unable
to find out very much about stomas on the
Internet, I had the idea of starting a website.
I want to help people have access to
information and I also want people to see
that life does not come to an end after a stoma.
On the contrary!!
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Since I’ve had
a stoma I have noticed that there is still a
common misconception: many people whom I
talk to think that only older people have
stomas; surely I am far too young? They are also
surprised that you can’t see anything,
they’d expected to see a small lump under my
clothes. They see a stoma as a
limitation, while this does not have to be the
case.
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I hope this
website will get rid of these prejudices.
Of course, I do have the occasional off day when
I wish that I didn’t have a stoma, but
then I think back on all the things I couldn’t
do and which I now can and I am extremely happy
that I do, in fact, have a stoma. It is and will
remain a less than ideal solution but as a
result I can get on with my life again
and do things which I was unable to do when I
was still sick. I can quite categorically state
that my stoma has had a positive influence
on my life.
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A stoma is
formed when you can no longer use a certain part
of your bowel as a result of some illness. You
may have heard of Crohn’s disease or ulcerative
colitis. In my case it is still not quite clear
what was wrong. What I have resembles
Hirschsprung’s disease but it isn’t. The doctors
suspect that it probably has something to do
with the nerves in the bowel. Over the years my
large bowel has made increasingly fewer
peristaltic movements so that the faeces have
not been pushed forward. Also my stomach and
small bowel began to work increasingly more
slowly; my doctor called it “traffic jamming”.
In addition I never had the feeling that I had
to go as my sphincter doesn’t seem to work.
Normally your sphincter relaxes when you have to
go to the lavatory and it opens up but my
sphincter does not, so no faeces can be
evacuated. The umbrella term for all kinds of
serious constipation problems is “slow transit
constipation” (STC). So at least I can give it a
name.
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I had had
problems with my bowels my whole life but around
the age of fourteen the situation became
so bad that I really suffered from chronic
constipation. As a result of this I had
other problems: hair loss, fluid retention, skin
inflammation, a thyroid gland that was too slow,
instability of the pelvis, extreme fatigue etc.
You hang on to all your waste matter as it were.
My whole body was confused, your bowels are so
important. Over the years I had seen many
doctors and had always been told that it was
all in my mind, my large bowel looked
absolutely perfect… At a certain point enemas
and laxatives no longer worked and every
trip to the lavatory ended in failure. When they
took a picture of my stomach in the hospital the
radiologist said to me: “it won’t be long
before the poop comes out the other end”.
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I was given a
tip and started with colon hydrotherapy;
in this procedure your whole large bowel is
flushed out using special equipment in a
clinic. My faeces appeared to have calcified
and had to be slowly soaked and softened. But
this was such a relief for me and my
other problems gradually started to go away.
Unfortunately, I noticed the therapy was
becoming increasingly frequent and I even had to
carry out the procedure myself at home. I
realised that I could not go on without flushing
my bowels, otherwise they would fill up with
faeces in a very short period of time. |
Fortunately, I finally ended up
in a hospital where they took me
seriously. After a number of tedious
examinations, it was established that my
large bowel and sphincter no longer worked
and a stoma was the only solution for
me. I was not unduly shocked and as I already
had some inkling of what was coming. I went on
the waiting list and some months later I
was operated on and a stoma was formed. What a
relief that was! At last I no longer
needed to flush every day. Many other problems
disappeared and I felt great again for the first
time in years. I am alive and enjoying life
again!! |
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I get a lot of
enthusiastic reactions to the tattoo on my
stomach so it seems to me a good idea to say a
bit more about this here. I had the butterfly
done when I had had my stoma for half a year.
The symbolic meaning of a butterfly is freedom,
transformation, joy, courage and development.
And that’s what a butterfly means for me too:
due to my illness I was in a cocoon, I could do
nothing anymore and simply lay in bed. When I
got my stoma I could at last fly away and get my
life back on track.
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