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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!!


 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

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”.

 
 

 

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!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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