Un-Related to Ileostomies, but a broken-face part of life

Unrelated...

When I was 17 I entered a relationship with a boy that I thought I would marry. Yeah yeah.. young love and all that happy crappy.
It was mostly an entirely unsexual bonding, and the guy was more like a really best friend. Our conversations rocked, but whenever i wasn't physically in front of him, he forgot me. Forgot my birthday numerous times, forgot ot call me, or I'd wait all day for a time we were supposed ot have together, but.. he forot and was playign World of Warcraft with his buddies. :/
Nice.
Anyway, not bitching, I'm over it, but one of my birthdays, the last I spent with him, we got into a fight, and well, my ratty hair got grabbed by the back of my skull, and my lover face and jaw were delightfully smashed against a cement windowsill. I blacked out there on the kitchen floor, and when I woke, there was blood everywhere and I was crying out "where's my tooth?" 

With my mother's angry urging, he paid the not-insurance-covered coin to replace my tooth with a ceramic cap.
but about 6 years later, when my husband & I returned to MN, it broke off as we were riding in the car to get groceries.
YAY!

So that's without the crown. My little stub. Aint it just cute?
Now that we're on foodstamps (yay :( ) and dont make no money without no jobs, we were able to cover some of the enormous cost with some deal my husband did because it involved numbers and research and that's HIS bag--I do the stuff that doesn't require math. That's our deal, that's our teamwork. 

So after many times of a temporary cap thing falling off while I'm drinking my morning coffee or sipping Butternut Squash soup, I finally got my 'permanent' crown on once again.
In direct sunlight, it's a bit off-coloured compared to my other teeth, but it'll do, right?

Nice patch of sunlight there right on that fucker.

Unforch for my time as a young 20's -something, that birthday present from my X-boyfriend (Happy birthday! I forgot it was your birthday again--but here's a broken face!) also included a broken jaw.

So there's a bulge on my jaw there where the bone healed all weird... and damn, one day when I have money I'm gonna get it shaved smooth or something.

Yay for depressing update!

Gonna work on some more blog posts related to ileostomies now. Sorry for all that!

<3

My top lip was also busted open, and I have a faint scar there I can cover with some old theatre makeup that's awesomely cake-y, but I can't whistle anymore. That fucking sucks. I used to whistle like, crazy good and that pisses me off more than the broken jaw.

Total colectomy--totally rad?

Next Monday is my total coloectomy, where my loop ileo is going to be made permanent. So much of my time for months has been literally filled with doctors appointments, even for diff stuff than the ileo) that this just seems like another thing, but it's not. I am finally going to be rid of my stupid hateful piece of shit large intestine. I'm glad to be rid of it, but I'm concerned, naturally, about how I'm going to heal.

Bromaline helps with healing, but it only does so much. My Swedish surgeon told me is takes 5-7 hours to perform this operation. (Forgive me for not being as eloquent this time around, but Blogger erased my post without so much as a tiny trace and I'm having to re-do everything right now off what I can barely remember.)

So anyway, any loop ileo will get "Spillover", the redundant stoma sucking up liquid waste into the large intestine just as its been used to doing it's whole existence. It will continue to do this after loop surgery, sucking up waste from the bag even if you are very careful. My surgeon from Sweden was very blase about this as it WILL HAPPEN  to everyone that has a loop, he so said, but my initial Asshole surgeon went so far as to scorn even the idea that it could possibly ever happen. Stupid stupid asshole.

anyway, so that's my problem, and with the total coletomy, this will be less of a problem, but still something to watch for, trying to "express" the contents of my large intestine, as they will leave a rectal stump to hold up my lil vag so sex doesn't hurt.

I am worried about healing and about my husband being able to remain in the room with me, and about swelling and about surgical complications and about getting out of the hospital quickly. Since going to the emergency room for 16 blood sugar, (WTF that ever means, who knows), my heart hasn't been working quite right, so yeah I'm worried.

The picture above is how my large intestine looks now. When i was 17 I had a large intestinal resection, where they chopped it apart and fit it together like so, so I'm hoping that in light of this, the surgery will not take as long as "normals" who don't already have partial intestine missing and an already-in-place ileostomy.

I'm incoherent with worry, I acknowledge this, and also exhausted with having to rewrite this post and not having having any down time since this whole excursion of pain and suffering really began to sink it's claws into me. All I can ask is for prayers and well-wishes, I'm just too scared sometimes to know how to proceed, and knowing, or thinking, that someone else out there is wishing me well gives me the strength to face another minute of this insanity.

Prep for Surgery

Last time I had a colonoscopy, the two Bisacodyl and two jars of fizzy crap mag citrate didn't work for me. and I mean, I am far below my normal 90 lb weight and this one-size-fits all 'scopy meds didn't hardly make a gurgle in my intestines. Well, I guess that's why I'm having an Ileostomy.

So before surgery, I'm supposed to drink FOUR bottles and take FOUR pills, starting 2 days ahead of time. So I started at 4 pm, and shock and surprise--but this thing ain't going like it's supposed to. To pardon the stupid pun, heh heh. But no laughter! I am in a very unpleasant state right now. Fuck fucking bisacockl and fag citrate.

While I visit the toilet, I'm reminded of Rejected Cartoons by: Don Hertzfeldt--specifically the one with "My anus is bleeding!!" "For the love of god and all that is holey...!" or something like that. yes indeed little ass-bleeding cloud, yes indeed. Not that I'm bleeding or anything, but holey christ it feels like that sometiems.

So while I'm waiting, I'm catching up on watching movies--movies I'd never really thought I wanted to watch. Like the first Transformers. Eh, it's fairly decent--for being a seriously retarded piece of shit.  63 minutes in when the robot cars start talking, I kind of mentally checked-out.

The bag they gave me to practice with is seriously huge. Especially since I'm 4'10 and stopped growing when I was 12. 12 years old. I'm the size of a 12-year old, just to reiterate. So no I don't need a damn 50 gallon bag trailing down between my legs and dragging on the floor by my feet like a giant deflated testicle. Maybe I could just have a wheelbarrow and wheel around my bag. Oh don't mind me... just wheeling around 50 gallons of feces.
Still worried about placement--Dr dude is seriously a gangrene-crusted peener, so instead of sleeping I'm here watching this shit movie on my laptop before the government shuts down streaming, listening to giant june-bugs hitting the windows like rain, and worrying that the bag is going to be higher than the delicious little marking.

Surgery's Coming.....

At my last appointment, I met with the Dr and he preferred to do a Loop Ileo for his own b-tard reasons. Now I'll have to have another surgery in the near future to do total collectomy, and he gave me the lovely statistics that 80% of Ileostomates need revision surgery for herniations, infections etc. Oh GOOD. After the hour long spiel and schematics explanation, I asked him where he'd place it and he pointed to BESIDE MY BELLY BUTTON. Um, fuck no.

The same appointment the ostomy nurse marked me, and she marked it really low beside my right hip. Well, like an inch horizontally from my hip bone. I LOVE where she marked it. If he ostomizes (yeah, it's a made-up word, shut it) me there, then I can still actually you know, wear clothes like a respectable human being. This is what I've been worrying over, as I have surgery in Seven daaayyyyysssss...... (said in creepy voice).

I mean, I'm hard-core worrying. I worry about recovery, yeah, because everyone says you're fucking fucked-up as shit afterward (I understand that, I had an 5 or 6-hour long colonic resection when I was 17, after all); fucked up like, your intestines are so swollen shut that you can't pass anything from your stupid ostomy for days. Sometimes even weeks. Oh joy. What young woman doesn't want to look as swollen as a basketball.
But mostly, I'm worried about placement. That can really make or break the rest of my "enjoyable" life for me. If this arrogant Dr doesn't place it where the ostomy nurse did, I'm fucked. Royally.

(Pic's where nurse marked it, clear tape peeling---->
Big scar from resection, little scars from 2nd endometriosis and lysis of adhestions Lap surgery in Feb)

The other scary thing about this is that every time I've gone to an appointment with him, I had a strong intuition about what was going to happen next. When I first met with him in December, we (my old mom and I) brought my old records and tests with. She being an RN along with other creds too many to list was convinced that this would be enough for him to scedual a surgery. I KNEW he was going to re-order all the tests again. And guess what? Bam. He did, that motherfucker. For the next 5 months I was put through hell as I did test after test for this sceptical asshole, as I lost more and more weight and became more and more dysfunctional until I'm at the point I am now, barely able to drink Ensure every damn day.
On our next visit, my mom was convinced again this would be enoguh for him. Nope. One more test, just as I predicted. Small bowel follow-through, with Gastrograffin instead of barium. (Ask your Dr about it, waaay better than Barium <3) That went fine, then two weeks later we were FINALLY able to secure a surgery date with him. But as I've predicted correctly everything that happened so far, I'm afraid that he is going to place it high. I have this terrible sinking feeling that he's going to place it where HE wants, not where the nurse marked it.  

:(