Rectal Stump and Removing Mucus

Does anyone have experiences/ tips to share about efficiently and quickly removing mucous from rectal stump

Hello ileogal06.

Thanks for asking the question. My immediate thoughts were, that it is a question which has been asked many times before and the discussions on and surrounding the subject can be found on the left hand side of your screen in: CONTENTS -Collections- Ostomy related complications. There are lots of threads and posts in that section dealing with this issue. However, I was specifically looking for one of my my previous replies so that I could cut and paste it for your here. Unfortunately, I could not find it so I'll attempt to share with you what I did to resolve the problem in the early days.

I tried all sorts of different things to no avail until I thought I would give anal irrigation a go, as I had been using this proceedure before my operation.

It did not work with the gravity feed and the cone method because there was not enough pressure in the water to dislodsge the mucus from the walls of the anus. After a lot of experimentation, I made a gadget that fitted to the shower unit in the bath so that I could irrigate and watch the output as it discharged onto the base of the bath.

The gadget (or gadgets I used were adaptations of the anal irrigation catheters that I had left over from my incontinent days.

I needed to seal up the  part which inflates the rubber balloon, which I did by melting it with a soldering iron and adapt the other end so that it fitted onto the shower hose.

The catheters are designed so that the water jets out of the sides(at the end) which was fine for cleaning the walls of the anus but did not work for the upper end so I cut off the end of one catheter to let the water jet straight out. This worked well when I used the straight jet first, followed by the side jets, where I twisted the catheter back and forth so that it cleaned everywhere.   Thus, cleaning from the upper end of the anus first, then  right down to the exit. (I likened it to the old fashioned chimney sweep). The muck came out so that I could see it floating down the bath, which gave me a certain satistfaction, knowing that the method worked.

This proceedure went on for about a year, in which time the mucus changed from being foul smelling, lumpy and multi-coloured, to getting clearer and clearer until it was milky white and had no smell at all. At this point, I felt that I could cope with the more acceptable discharge and gradually stopped the irrigation proceedure. I have been using incontinence pads ever since as this discharge is odour free and doesn't bother me like it used to.

A serious word of warning: If you go down the anal irrigation route as described: There is no feeling in the internal walls of the anus so there is a very real danger that using a catheter could cause damage if you are not used to it and do not know when to stop. I had the (dubious) advantage of having to anally irrigate for years before I had a stoma but even then, the medics were recommending using the cone, rather than the catheter because there was less likelyhood of causing damage. The problem with that is, the cone did not work before and did not work for the mucus either.

I hope this helps in some way.

Best wishes

Bill