Emmy’s Story

My stoma story, sorry for the long story.

November last year diagnosed with anus cancer didn't affect my lymph nodes so no cancer treatment besides my APR and sigmoid stoma which was done January 2021.

Prior to my surgery I suffered severe constipation and laxatives my only solution but as time past I needed to use more and more laxatives, which surgeon didn’t look into back then.

First two months I was fine bowel and stoma working very well, thinking good constipation solved, come the four month mark back with dealing with constipation again laxatives the only solution. I even tried irrigation to see if that would help, well I would be sitting with the sleeve on for two hours waiting for output if any would come unless I used laxatives.

Laxatives are not a long term solution.

Come July this year I admitted myself into Epworth Hospital through emergency with Pancreas, issues and mentioned my constipation was admitted, surgeon came into to see why are you here and I told him I need to find out what’s wrong with me.

Well, over the weekend surgeon kept ringing through to find out if I had a bowel motion which I didn’t, had a transit bowel study over four days. For a full 8 days I had no bowel output.

Decision was to remove my large, so surgery went ahead unfortunately I had a lot of post surgery complications. I haemorrhaged and then contracted sepsis, the sepsis killed of 12cm of my small bowel.

Then three of my wound opened up requiring further treatment by wound healing Vacuum pac.

So in total in one week I had three surgeries and my children were told I had 50% chance of coming through this and spent a total of 11 weeks in hospital. Well four and half months later and finally feeling really well.

Written by Emmy (January 2022)

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