Hello 2010!

The year 2009 sucked for me as I spent 2 months in the hospital.  I felt as if my life hung in the balance as one illness after another hit me.  And when the illnesses were quiet I would then feel one complication from my medication after another.

By contrast, 2010 is looking awesome!   Surgery was the best thing I (we) did to cure colitis.  It's amazing how easy and natural it all seems now.  We hike for hours at a time.  We enjoy everything we did before the illness.  I can eat McDonald's and all sorts of crap again (not that I choose to).    And thank god, I don't need prednisone or other immuno-suppressive crap running through my body.  Life is good!

I love having a body that is not at odds with itself.  I love that it runs like a well-oiled machine again.  I love that I don't have to choose anymore between a healthy immune system and a healthy digestive system.  I love that I don't have to scour the web for new cures, search for novel studies or try more invasive biological treatments that I know will not work for more than a year or two.  That I don't have to use 1/4 cup of fish oil a day or naltrexone or immuran or prednisone or sleeping pills or a roll of toilet paper every 5 hours or battle anemia or remicade or....

You may be very perceptive and asking yourself why I wrote that "we" did surgery to cure colitis.  Although I had to bare the physical pain of surgery, my wife helps me with every flange change now and makes life so much easier.  She also made life easier and safer for me before surgery.  I see my new stoma and bag as a "we" thing.  It's ours. It gives us a chance, no, actually, it forces us to have private time together as she helps me with my personal health care.   Actually, it's very intimate and, to both of us, very romantic. Not that it incites a twisted tantric episode of sexual exploration of perverse proportions (stomal sex) or anything.  Just the contrary: it allows us to love and care for one another, through sickness and health and to respect one another's humanness, mortality and care for one another through the good and the bad.  It forces us to take time to "cuddle" too, something which I wouldn't otherwise do much of.

Looking ahead: My goal for 2010 is to find new ways of saying yes to life.  Though I am not ready to have kids (hey, I just got my physical health back after so many years!) I would like to do the following:

-To remember what hand of  cards I was dealt, how I (we) overcame it and how to now be a well person who is not defined by colitis.  I want to get (back) into motorcycle racing, dirtbiking, rock climbing, mountain biking and weight lifting.  Maybe even learn some new skills to enhance my career or even invest in a new business.   Maybe I can also be an ostomy visitor for new patients who are scared.

To get started I'll need to get ostomy supplies that are a bit less cumbersome.  I do have a sneaking suspicion that my current bag seems to hang a bit low.  It just seems to not fit right.  Any suggestions are welcome.