Oooh! That Smell!

(With apologies to Lynrd Skynrd)

Karen and I went to the Cities on Wednesday to have my official post-op visit with Dr. Madoff, my surgeon. The idea of going down now, two and a half months after my surgery, seemed a bit unnecessary but we went anyway. Dr. Madoff was in good spirits and encouraging in regards to some lingering side effects of the surgery; things that are probably complicated by the chemo. From that perspective the trip was good.  It was getting there, that proved to be ...problematic.

Tuesday evening I changed my ostomy bag in preparation for the journey down to the Cities the next day. I had a nice shower with minimal pooping in the shower and put a new bag on a clean belly and life was good. Right.  During the night I got up to walk off some cramps in my calves and noticed a nasty odor and I knew where that was coming from. Damn, I just changed the bag 8 hours ago. It shouldn't blow out now. It really shouldn't blow out at all.  So, instead of walking my cramps out I was standing in the bathroom at 2:30 in the morning, removing my blown bag, cleaning myself up and applying a new ostomy bag. This is not good.  It is not unusual to have to get up during the night to do something with my bag, but getting up to do a complete replacement is just not that fun.

In the morning we packed our cooler with lunch and snacks and headed out. I had my little ostomy kit bag with 2 spare ostomy bags and the other necessary supplies.  At the last minute I put a pair of fleece sweat pants, an extra shirt and the other ostomy belt in a bag, just in case.

We stopped along the way for breakfast, at Mr. Ed's in Motley; (5 stars out of 5 for the Mr. Ed skillet) and gassed up the van. A few minutes after we pulled out Karen and I both noticed a bad smell coming from... you guessed  it. Another blow out! Damn! Damn! Damn!  Karen was driving which proved to be very good because I sat in the passenger seat trying to keep my shirt and sweater tucked up under my chin while i peeked at the mess inside the belt around my belly.  That would have been a bit difficult to do while driving. She turned around and pulled into a gas station. I grabbed my bag of clothes and my ostomy kit bag and headed for the men's room. The sign on the door said it was not a public restroom, but there for the convenience of paying customers.  Too bad.

For a service station john, this one wasn't too bad. I've seen worse. What was nice was the baby changing table that folded down from the wall. In short order I had my sweater and shirt off and slid the poopy ostomy belt down over my jeans and shoes without getting any on me or my clothes. Ah! The whole thing was disgusting.  My poop is usually fairly thick but this was thick with a capital T. It looked the heavy stomach contents you see in road-killed deer; all yellow-brown and full of fibery stuff. We are still not sure why the bag blew. Maybe the belt just held the bag too tightly and the pressure made it blow. After all, it has to go somewhere.

Normally I do the bag changing at my convenience, without the added pressure of 'paying customers' trying to get in to help. No pressure there. I ripped off the smelly bag and pitched it in the trash and started cleaning myself up. Thankfully, my ostomy was done pooping for a while. Life is always interesting when you are trying to clean yourself up and your ostomy is still pooping. Kind of like changing diapers on a baby. They can't wait to mess up the bum you just cleaned. The worst part was removing the adhesive paste. Ostomates use a paste adhesive around the opening in the ostomy bag to help create a odor and poop proof seal.  Often the paste peels right off, but that is after the bag has been on for a few days.  This paste is just hours old and sticks to my belly like gooey rubber cement.  I pick and and pick and try to rub it off and finally, after several minutes, manage to get my belly clean enough to apply the new bag.  While all this was happening I had one of the spare bags tucked down in the seat of my jeans, to warm up. The adhesive flange sticks better when it is warm.  Sometimes Karen helps me at home and she usually sticks the bag up under her shirt or down her pants, to warm it up but Karen was out in the van, knitting peacefully.

I apply paste to the new bag and stick it to my belly, trying to force it down snug all the way around and create a tight seal. Just for good measure I apply srtips of surgical tape all around the perimeter, 'just in case'. Because I am worried about another blowout I put on my sweat pants. My jeans are still clean but if I have an accident, I don't want them wrecked with poop.  We are only halfway to the Cities and not even halfway through our day and I am more than a little nervous. I put the poopy belt in a bag, finish dressing, gather my plunder and return the van and we head out again.

I want to be mad and I am, a bit. Mostly I am disgusted. Ths is just such a mess, an uncontrolled mess and I resent the whole ostomy for a few miles, like that is going to be helpful. Karen offers to listen if I want to vent but I really don't have anything useful to say. What can I say?

Now I am paranoid and give myself the sniff test every so often.  But it isn't till we are on 694 by Brooklyn Center that we realize something foul is in the air, again.  Oooh, Oooh, that smell! Damn, not again! Karen takes the first exit and steers us off the interstate. Once again I am trying to hold my clothes out of the way but this blowout is larger. Thick gnarly poop is leaking out of both sides, poop the consistency of adobe is trying to swarm down into my jeans and beginning to succeed. Of course we have to wait at a light and I am trying not to be frantic.  I know I need to be somewhere where I can have a bit of privacy but don't relish the idea of walking into another service station john with my clothes held up in one hand while cowpies fall from my belly, ploppity plop onto the floor. Instead we pull into an alley behind a small strip mall.

I don't know what to do but I am pretty sure I don't want to do it in our van. I have this poopy bundle trying to be part of my lap so I open the door and step outside and my lap disappears.  The poopy  problem persists. RIght away I try to get  my sweater off and then my shirt without wearing my own shit. The sweater makes it but the shirt takes a hit and gets thrown into the far back of the van. Now I am standing shirtless, outside, in an alley behind this mall, trying to figure out what to do next. Karen is trying to figure out what to do but she is just as lost as I am.  I feel a bit like a triage doctor because I stick my hands out and ask Karen to put on the disposable gloves that I routinely use in dealing with my bag. And then I ask for the baggie full of paper towels so I can start wiping up the mess. I get some of the worst of the poop off and then I pull the bag off and pitch it to the ground.  We find an empty plastic bag and I put the soiled paper towels and the blown-out bag into this, because we are No Trace campers. After all, who want to find a mess like that in an alley and besides, I am trying not step in my own filth. God, what an image.

My ostomy decides to be active again and start hemorraging black green runny poop from my belly. Karen spies it first and warms me but it is too late. A runny goober lands on the waistband of my sweats. I try to dab it off with a paper towel  but have to move my feet first, before they get hit too. This is getting out of hand. We are out of paper towels, the poop shows no signs of letting up. A strategic retreat is in order.

Karen tells me to grab the barf bag we have in the door compartment, a vestige of an earlier trip with a friend, who managed to fill the speakers in our Saturn when she got sick in the car. This barf bag has a plastic ring around the mouth and I hold the ring just below the ostomy and slide back into the seat while Karen drives us to the nearby SuperAmerica station for paper towels and baby wipes. We pull up in front of the store and Karen goes in while I wait, shirtless, in the front seat with a barf bag of poop. I am OK for now and the wait doesn't seem too long from my perspective.  Karen tells me later what happened. She walks in and realizes she is the only white person in the store and stands at the counter while the clerk and a woman she knows have a finger waving in yo' face discussion. Finally Karen pays for the stuff and heads out. On the way she notices a guy looking at her strangely and realizes that part of the last remaining ostomy bag is hanging out the front of her pants. She waits for the cry of "Stop! Shoplifter!" but nothing happens.

In a few minutes we are back in our alley and I am outside the van, shivering in the cold, trying to scrape off the gooey adhesive. I am not getting anywhere. I even resort to using one of Karen's coffee stir-sticks like a scraper but that stuff just does not want to budge. I clean up the area around the ostomy and Karen removes the last bag from her pants and I apply adhesive around the opening and slap the mother on my belly and hope for the best.

But I am still half-naked, with some very smelly clothes on.  I can tell you it has been a while since I took my pants off in a vehicle but that's what happened next. Off with the sweats, off with the underwear. Out with the baby wipes and I cleaned up as well as I could and put on my spare shirt and jeans.  This is where I got a bit nervous. On canoe trips I never put on my last dry clothes if it is still raining and I had the feeling I would be in deep smelly do-do if this last bag blew and my last clean clothes became soiled, too. Karen reminded me where we were; that there were plenty of places to buy clothes if it came to that. One last trip to the service station so I could wash my hands and we were off.

In a little while we met with Justine and waited together for my appointment. We were able to score a few bags from their ostomy department, in case another emergency developed but apparently the crisis had passed; literally and figuratively. The rest of the day and the late night trip home went fine and this morning I changed the bag I put on in the alley in Brooklyn Center.

This is a long tale and if it has a moral, it is to be prepared. And we were, sort of. Luckily we both found the humor in the situation right away. Well, Karen found the humor first but she had a different perspective. I knew before we were back on the interstate that I had to find this episode funny or my day would be wrecked. So I did. I am proud of the fact that no one got yelled at, nothing got thrown or broken and the swearing was minimal and completely in context. And, we left no trace.

Take only pictures. Leave only tracks.
Peace and love to all.
Mike