Things to Know About Colostomy Management

The importance of managing your colostomy becomes even more important when you have to do ostomy irrigation. You don’t want to experience stool excretion accidently especially when you are doing ostomy irrigation.

It largely depends on the type of colostomy surgery that you have got. The location of your stoma and ostomy play an important role in how easily you end up training your colostomy. Remember, when your stool starts advancing towards the point of excretion, it is a liquefied waste that carries more water which has to be absorbed your colon. By the time it reaches the point of excretion, it is a fully formed hard stool which has given most of its water content to the colon. It means that if your colostomy has left a bigger portion of your colon intact, your ostomy bag is going to collect more formed stool.

But if the colostomy is ascending, the stool that will come out of your stoma will be more liquid; and it will be more unpredictable at the time of its evacuation. The transverse colostomy will result in pasty and softer stool which will not be fully liquefied but it will still be unpredictable. The descending, or sigmoid, colostomy allows you to have more of your colon to be there. It means that the stool coming out of this ostomy will be more formed. It will be predictable quite like the scenario when you had your entire colon intact. You can train this descending colostomy in accordance with your diet and irrigation routine.

A descending colostomy is easier to manage because the stomal output it results in is not liquefied enough to cause irritation in the peristomal skin. But it doesn’t mean that you are better off without a skin barrier if you have a descending colostomy. You need to wear a skin barrier to ensure better protection of the skin around your stoma. The ostomy bag you will need to use with a descending ostomy is the close-end pouch. Once it collects the stool, you are going to have to replace the bag.

But if you have an ascending or transverse colostomy, you are going to need a drainable pouch which can be emptied whenever you need. The best practice is to empty the bag when one-third of it gets filled with the stool. Be sure to empty the bag before going to bed. Alternatively, you can consider using a night-time bag which can be connected the main pouch by the means of a connecting tube.