I’m so excited to announce that I’ve teamed up with the British Medical Journal to write an article for their “What your Patient is Thinking” series! This series is a collection of patient stories aimed at helping to educate healthcare professionals about what it’s like to live with a condition, from a patient’s perspective.

Writing this piece for them was a new challenge for me and I really enjoyed how it stretched me.  I realized that with this website, social media and other platforms I’ve written for, I have so much freedom in what I write, how I structure it and how many words I use (I’m wordy, you know that). Recently I’ve been taking on more writing projects for platforms that give me a little more structure to follow (word counts?!, editors and preferred article guidelines?!).  After writing so much for myself (and you, of course!), I’ve been enjoying expanding my brain a little bit to try something new.

This was also a really cool opportunity to educate more people about what an ostomy is. One of the last pieces of editorial feedback I received was a question on my repeated use of the word “ostomy” rather than “colostomy”.  I explained that the word “colostomy” is not a synonym for “ostomy” but instead describes a type of ostomy. I jumped on the opportunity to explain the differences in types of ostomies, and that I did not have a “colostomy”, but an “ileostomy”, which is kind of the same as, but also different from a colostomy.   We agreed that I could use the word “ostomy” throughout my article and I was relieved that I’d been able to start a larger conversation with them.

Writing for the British Medical Journal was extra exciting for me because they mailed me a paper copy of the journal they print that it’s in.  I’ve never had my work published in print before so I’ve been happy dancing all over the place! Don’t worry though, it’s online too, so if you’d like to read my piece you can!  I talk about how healthcare professionals helped me adjust to life with an ileostomy and it’s called “Can you cartwheel with an ostomy?”.

Have your healthcare professionals helped you adjust to life with an ostomy? What do you think they could have done differently to make your adjustment more smooth?