It’s so long since I have been on here that the format of WordPress has changed and i’m all confused :-s

Things have been good but the last few days have seen me stressed as I have had two leaks, two mornings running.  They haven’t been majorly messy as I am a very light sleeper and have woken as soon as it has started but this has meant getting up and showered both mornings before 5.30am – i’m tired!

I don’t know why this is happening. It could be my haphazard cutting so I have remeasured and re cut using a template this morning which will hopefully help.  It could also be the fact that my supplier has run out of my usual bags and has had to send out slightly different ones.  The ones I normally have have a see through lining so I can see my stoma under the cover but these ones have an opaque lining which means I can’t see.  To the ordinary eye this should make no difference as essentially the bags are the same but it means that I might not be getting my placement completely right as I can’t see to tell and it also means that I can’t see if the bag starts to lift and therefore needs replacing which sometimes it does if my output it particularly thick and settles around the stoma. It could also be because I ate rice.  Rice doesn’t cause me any blockages but I have noticed that it thickens up my output and puts my peristalsis out of sync meaning that my stoma is more active at night .  As the output is so thick and I am lieing down it sits around the stoma and eventually leaks under the bag – this is not helped by the fact that my stoma is slightly dozy and slips under my bag anyway despite a convex bag and belt – ahhhhh! I am sure I will sort it out and get to the route of the problem as this has rarely happened before but two days before Christmas I could really do without it!

However, it is CHRISTMAS! and I love Christmas and this year I am particularly excited as I have more energy (despite early starts) than ever before and this Christmas is set to be a great one as we have been a little more extravagant than usual and we are having a quiet Christmas at home with a friend coming to stay – I am really excited.

The kids are bouncing with energy and excitement despite having bad colds and watching them is lovely.  This will be the first year my youngest has really understood what is happening and he is bewildered by it all.  Tomorrow we are having tea with Santa – how very sophisticated!

It’s been a stressful, scary, exciting, momentous, amazing, painful, fun, enlightening, thrilling year filled with lots of love.  I will be glad to see the back of it for obvious reasons but am also thankful for it and for the first time in my adult life I am truly looking forward to a new year with enormous anticipation and excitement.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Healthy New Year x

I’ve had no time to write recently as I have been bogged down organising my sons playgroup Christmas Fair – a much bigger and mnore time consuming task than I has imagined.  The date finally arrived and the Fair was on Saturday and went fantastically well.  We raised £1200 which is £400 up on any other year.  I am realy, really chuffed as I lead this event and put a lot of time and effort into it. This is something that I would never have been able to achieve in the five years prior to my op so felt amazing to do.  It was an exhausting day but no more so for me than it would have been for any other person doing a full on twelve hour day – amazing!

I am feeling great now, so much so that I am going to venture out to my West Coast Swing class in London tonight for the first time in six months.  I have been dancing Jive for the last couple of weeks but am yet to go back to my first love WCS.  I am very nervous and always get anxious about doing too much and getting tired but after Saturday I feel a lot tougher and am up for it -I can’t wait in fact, it will be fab to see my dance friends again.

I finally got my scan results last week.  It turns out that there is a bulge in my pouch when the barium goes through it.  They don’t think it is a leak and my surgeon said that he is 99.9 per cent certain all is perfectly well but he wants to be 100 per cent certain and therefore feels that I should leave take down for another six weeks and be rescanned in the first week of January.  This is fine as I had no intention of having take down before January anyway so it makes no difference, I just hope that everything is as it should be come that time as I don’t really want to have to wait much longer than that.  I am still a bit nervous about this op especially after reading of the difficulties Carman and Brenda have had with their take down but I have decided to face that bridge when I have to and not concern myself with it until then, besides Christmas is on its way and I love the festive season.

I love, love, love Decemeber so am very excited that the Christmas Fair is over, I have no op to worry about and I can spend the next month having lots of fun with the three great men in my life. My boys are really excited as I am sure most children are.  My two year old (who will be three in January) is just starting to appreciate the enormity of Christmas and is getting very excited about everything.  He doesn’t remember last year so everything is new and incredibly exciting for him, his little eyes keep popping out of his head at the sights of festive things and he is quickly getting to grips with the concept of great gifts soon to be heading his way through the excitement of his older brother. Christmas is definitely great with children around.

I have my flu jab and I no longer have UC so I am confident (for the first time in ten years) of an illness free, high energy Christmas – amazing, really amazing.  It is so incredible to think of the enormous improvement in my quality of life since the operation.  I wouldn’t want to go through the op again but as I have probably said before it was definitely worth it.

It has now taken me all day to write this as things keep interupting me and I now have to make the kids their dinner before they start shouting.  Shall try and get round to updating again soon.