When I was finished with my surgery and finally out of the hospital I broke down. I was strong and positive in the whole situation until I got home and had to change my first ostomy bag. I will admit it, I simply went into a ball of sadness and thought my life was over. Hey, we all process emotions differently and my processing always happens far after the fact and when things were finally calm it hit me that my life had fundamentally changed. Not only did I feel sad, but all the things I thought I would never do or be because of my new stoma started to crush me. Pitty parties don't last forever though and maybe a few weeks later I pulled it together and started to get into a good routine. Once I became familiar with my new daily lifestyle I decided that I would not let it affect my life. I took it as a challenge to be crazier and do more wild things. I started looking up National Parks that I wanted to go to and the hardest hikes I could possibly do. And you know what, I did it. Instead of wallowing in the fact that I have an ostomy bag I decided to learn how to incorporate it into my new plans of life. This was a big step to getting over my own depression from the whole ordeal. It was not an instant thing, but a learning curve of finding the best products for my stoma and what worked and what didn't. Now my professional training has taught me to never reinvent the wheel when you don't have to. I have spent years in schooling and even the best of the know that life didn't happen overnight. There are billions of smarter people that lived and have overcome many of the problems that you are currently working on completing. So I searched for athletes who had stomas. I first landed on Jack Host. Jack was a 19-year-old when he had a colostomy and didn't let that stop him from becoming a world-class athlete. I knew that there was more than hope, but a reality of how to be active and wild with a stoma. Jack not only ran marathons but Iron Man competitions as well. That means that humans with a stoma can run 24 miles, bike 100 plus miles, and swim for two miles all in a day with a stoma. I will have what he is having were my first thoughts. So it turns out that he uses items that I can get over the counter and that is incredible. His stoma didn't break his dream at all instead he got new dreams from it. That is what I am doing now and it is motivation stories like this that allowed me to do it. So I highly suggest being social and searching for people who are actually doing what you want to do with a stoma. Go on social media and find people who have stomas. Follow those people and the journey they are willing to post and learn from them. I like to learn from other people's failures and I also post my stories too! I want us all to get better so the next person with a stoma doesn't have those same failures and doesn't reinvent the wheel.
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Lyman Burchett
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