Browneyedgirl, coming up with calling the bag a "jerk detector" has to be one of the most clever and useful things I've heard. Even with my holier-than-holy memory, I can probably remember that most useful two-word phrase.
Nini, Nini, Nini - It's rare that I want to hug and slap someone at the same time. You're only destined to be alone if that's the destiny you choose. If it's true that no man will ever accept your situation, you are most certainly hanging out in the wrong places.
My apologies in advance. I often talk about the husband I lost last year who was everything to me. I'm sorry if anyone is tired of hearing about "St. Michael", as two of my friends, also named Michael, used to call him. I've had Crohn's disease since the mid-1970s and met my husband in 1999. My ostomy joined the family in 2009. Before even the thought of an ostomy came into the picture, Mike once told me that his mother had had some kind of surgery in her abdominal area and every day his father would spend time with her, doing something at the surgery site. With what I know now, he may have been changing bandages. Mike never knew what his father did, but specifically told me he didn't know how his father was able to deal with it and he didn't think he could do something like that.
My stoma, Walter the Wenis, was a surprise addition to the family after two failed resections. A friend of Mike's told me that at one point he said he knew I was broken and just wanted to get me home and take care of me. I was horrified over the whole thing and in denial. He changed the bandages on my open wound and did 100% of the handling of Walter - changing the appliance, cleaning me up, changing the bedding, doing laundry, etc. This was the man who previously had said he didn't think he could do what his father did, which couldn't have been half as gross as dealing with a stoma. Mike died of cardiac arrest less than a year after my surgery. I don't put his death on my own shoulders, but I'd be a fool to think his death was totally unrelated to my - "our" - situation. He was under a lot of stress before Walter came along - our (lack of) money situation, work (actually lack of work), my health before the surgery - now I was no longer working and while we were, for the short time we were together, the most important person in each other's life, after my surgery I became the complete center of his world. My heart breaks each time I read about the healthier half of a couple leaving shortly after his or her (usually his) partner and by extension, the whole family, became stomatized. While I always appreciated all that Mike did and made it a point to regularly let him know how I felt, I really had no clue that he was part of such a minority. I previously thought what he did was closer to a "normal" response and the morons who walked were few and far between. I couldn't possibly imagine my father or one of my brothers walking out of their marriage because of something like this. Mike's concern was with my health and my life, not a bag of doody. As a matter of fact, before the surgery he sometimes would complain about a situation and fantasize about having a bag of poo to leave on a person's porch, so I was actually fulfilling his fantasies, although he never took advantage of the opportunity my surgery had given him.
There's certainly a difference between being in a fairly new relationship and learning the new partner's a bag person and being married or in a relationship when the partner becomes stomatized. I may not agree with the thinking, but can kind of understand someone not wanting to start a new relationship when there's already something perceived as a negative. I guess each person has some kind of unspoken limits - what if the person lost a hand in a freak accident? Has scars from a fire? Lost his or her nose from sticking it into too many people's business? OK, maybe not that last one. What about someone who's unemployed? Not as educated as one would like? What about if that person never learned which fork to use first?
What ever happened to "in sickness and in health"? Do people say "I do" without thinking about what they're saying? Again, my apologies. I know I get long-winded. If I ever move back to NJ, Primeboy, do you give seminars in how to say so much in so few words, as opposed to my style of saying very little while taking up lots of space?
Nini, there are too many people saying the same thing in different ways for you to not hear it. If a man's going to walk, take it as a gift that you found out early on and never forget that he's missing out on a good thing, while you're already dealing with a problem ass - you don't need two.