JUST BECAUSE WE NEEDED TO DO SOMETHING that felt good, we went out to dinner Saturday night. We usually save that sort of extravagance for special occasions but, I guess, we just decided to manufacture a special occasion. So off we went to our favorite mom & pop Italian restaurant. “We won’t need those menus,” I told the waitress. We always get the same thing. Why experiment when you know what you like. My wife got eggplant Florentine, I got veal parmigiana. Although we were nervous about eating in the restaurant, we selected a table that was a bit off to the side and no other parties were seated near us. It was great! For dessert, we split a piece of N.Y. cheesecake. My wife paid the tab, since she knows that I’m a lousy tipper (aka cheapskate). So for a short time, focused entirely on each other and our delicious meal, we forgot all about the madness and badness and sadness in the world. I think that I handled the turbulent Sixties – another rough decade – better than I’m handling what we’re living through today because I was younger, didn’t have kids or grandkids, and was busy poisoning my mind with an ever-expanding reading list, none of which involved politics or current events. The ostomy in 1964 saved me from Vietnam, and my old man’s cynicism and sense of absurdity are saving me from going completely bonkers today. One has to take advantage of one’s small opportunities.

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We conducted a survey to better understand the impact that living with an ostomy has on sleep.
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We sat down with two influential people in the ostomy community, to find out how they cope during challenging times.
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