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So this is going to be my fourth Christmas with an ostomy and every year I find something different to make the festive period a bit easier for me, especially as I work, have kids and I do all the cooking! I like my ostomy to work with me not against me!   Obviously the first thing I like to do is have all of my supplies ordered and then I start filtering out my supplies to the tower of drawers I have in my bathroom, refilling my emergency kits that I keep in my handbags and then I pop the extras in clear boxes on top of my wardrobe. I also being the one that cooks the food in...

This month I decided the next company we could highlight is Dansac which is actually the first ostomy bag make that I ever tried as it has some kind of sponsorship with my hospital. Now for me that actually wasn’t an issue because the Novalife bags supplied by Dansac were really good bags and I used them right up until I found the Peak Medical bags I now use.  Dansac is quite a big company who have a range of products that are generally a good product for new ostomates as they don’t have many extra ingredients like vitamin E or aloe vera (all of which I react too) I think because of the size of the Novalife I got used...

So this week has been Crohns and Colitis awareness week (inflammatory bowel disease aka IBD) and our diseases can vary wildly from person to person but some things affect us all. This week over on Instagram I did a post a week with a little snapshot how having ulcerative colitis affected me which I will share in this post. December 1st – Today marks the start of Crohns and Colitis awareness week! I had to have a rough guess at my medication tally but its definitely around 8! I was diagnosed 2 years after symptoms started. There is the possibility of more surgery but I’m still not sure how I feel about that yet. December 2nd – I don’t have many photos left...

Is this your first Christmas with an ostomy of any kind? Maybe you are a dab hand at this now or maybe you panic about running out of supplies over the festive period? Hopefully with this little guide on what I do when it comes to preparing to order my ostomy supplies delivery it might be a little less stressful! First of all please check out this post of when the last guaranteed delivery for Christmas is for the main companies here. Even though they are all open until around Christmas Eve some of them like to have a cut off date just to ensure you get those much needed supplies in time! So what else do I do before getting ready...

Hi Comfizz readers! Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about several elements surrounding the invisible disability of mental health. In these posts, I will be discussing various mental health matters & sharing my own mental health experiences, as well as including some useful mental health contacts & some tips I find help me. This week is the NHS’ #SelfCareWeek which ties in nicely with me starting this mini blog series. I will be including a self-care post closer to Christmas which I am super looking forward to writing. Mental health is something I have a lot of experience with & is also something I am very passionate about. So, what is mental health? Having a look around...

Firstly I would like to apologise to all my lovely readers for being a day late but the sickness bug had hit the Simpson household! Firstly with Ra-Ra being sick, then my bag kept filling up – I managed to be safe from vomiting as I took some anti sickness after laying on the kitchen floor dry heaving at 5:30 in the morning. 00Steve then was sick and got migraines and the only person who seemed free of the bug was Button although he was sick a few days before. I have done a post before on what it is like being “normal” person sick when chronically sick. But now onto the partial blockages as I suffered that the night leading...

To continue the posts about the different companies and the different products available we will look at Salts Healthcare. This company recently made waves in the ostomy community with their new look Confidence bags. Those waves were due to the colours of the ostomy bag being customisable (to an extent) with your outfit; as you may know many companies have the standard “medical” peachy coloured bags and then Coloplast have the grey coloured appliances but not Salts no they have gone for a skin tone they call stone, a white and a black. They in the last year have become available in a convex base plate which has opened up it’s availability to more ostomates. The bags from Salts have petals on the...

I get asked by a lot of people about exercising with a stoma, especially yoga. In this post, I will be speaking about my experience from starting yoga altogether post-surgery, so if you have had to step off the yoga mat to have surgery, getting back into yoga isn’t something I have experience of. First things first, yoga is not something I know loads about so what you are going to read is merely from my understanding and experience only. As always, it is best to consult a medical/trained professional before attempting yoga as everyone’s needs and limitations are different.   What are the benefits of yoga? Yoga is said to have many health benefits & what these benefits are can vary from...

So I thought I would do something a little different this week and I have written a few poems on life with an ostomy which you can find here, here and here. Often writing a particular theme can give you writers block especially on poems; this was certainly no different even though I used the acrostic style. Do you remember writing poems in this style as a child in primary schools often around harvest or Christmas?   O – opportunities to be experienced S – support from others T – travelling can become easier O – optimism for the future M – medical marvels Y – years to look forward too   L – less trips to the loo! I – independence regained F – fitness can be achieved once more E – events...

A year or so ago I decided to raise awareness for ostomies (for World IBD Day) by sticking ostomy bags to statues around where I live which you can read about here. The same year I believe I stuck a bag on my carved pumpkin which made for a good talking point for people when they came to our house; this is something easy we could all do and create awareness whilst having a bit of fun. I am going to do that again this year too with some of the bag samples that I didn’t get on with. I also aim to “osto bomb” some of our local places of interest with some decorated bags with ghosts and maybe even a pumpkin...