Ostomy Memories of Stoma Sounds

YOU KNOW HOW SOMETIMES your stoma talks to you… you don’t talk back, you just listen. So, I was laying in bed awake at about 3 AM this morning when the sounds commenced. Nothing unusual, really, until it kept up over a period of several minutes, a regular, repetitive, cross between a gurgle and a breath, and I could kind of feel it too. Another minute or two elapsed and it would pause momentarily, then start up again. That’s when I began to get a little worried. This hasn’t happened before, I thought, where it keeps up over and over, as if something is going on down there that is NOT USUAL. I scootched up in bed a little bit. That’s when I realized that Pipsqueak the cat was asleep about six inches from my left knee. The sound started up again. Oh, it’s the cat breathing, says I to myself. But I wasn’t positive, since I still imagined that I was feeling the exhalation at my stoma. I can’t explain that. Perhaps it was the action of sound waves over the bed linen in the still darkness. Perhaps my early AM imagination needed a downer. Perhaps I need to banish Pipsqueak from the bedroom…

Hello HenryM. 

In the peace and silence of the bedroom, sounds tend to be exaggerated and can appear to come from places that clearly are not possible, or from displaced places that 'should' not be possible.

I often hear the creaking of my ageing joints, the pulsing of my heart and arteries and the gurgling of my gut. Sometimes it gets so loud it wakes me up and I feel that there must be something going on outside to make so much noise. I have always had a rule that pets do not enter my sleeping domain - as they are simply an added distraction from the focus of sleeping. However, there is little that I can do to stop the morning birdsong or the persistent knocking on the windows when the birds seem to think they need feeding. 

Best wishes

Bill