Note: This was written in October 2013

It’s Coltrane’s one month birthday today!  He’s celebrating by giving me my first encounter with diarrhea as an ostomate, at least I think it’s diarrhea but I can’t be positive since I haven’t experienced it before.  I can’t figure out what triggered it, whether it’s food, a virus, or a partial blockage (hopefully not!).  In the last 2 days I’ve had a sort throat and semi-headache, runny nose, but I’ve also tried a couple new foods including a small bowl of homemade tomato soup, a couple small bites of homemade applesauce, and yogurt covered pretzels – mmmm.  Regardless of what triggered it, it’s been here on and off all day and now it’s 3:30am and I’m afraid to sleep for fear of a leak or my bag “exploding”.

So what has my experience with diarrhea been?  The output has been really runny (falls out of the bag without encouragement when emptying), I’ve eaten food thickeners which helped maybe just a little, and I’ve been emptying every 2-3 hours.  Oh, and there’s a lot of cramping/build-up before the liquid explodes out.  The output doesn’t smell right, it smells a lot more awful than normal output which smells like poop but doesn’t really bother me.