Lots going on since the last update

I had the colostomy surgery in October. I am very pleased with the results. The IBS symptoms/problems are almost completely gone. However I did get problems with severe heartburn and sensitive stomach after the surgery and am taking Nexium and Andapsin to protect the stomach. I still have symptoms from time to time and need to be a bit careful with what I eat but I feel pretty much ok.

The plan was that I'd get back to emptying the bladder by using my abdominal muscles once everything had healed but that didn't work. I find it much more difficult to get the right contact with the muscles now and tensing and relaxing them in the right way plus I am still a bit scared of pushing hard because of the potential risk of developing a hernia. So I have kept doing the ISC. Most of the time it works well or at least ok, but sometimes I get problems with pain after the bladder emptying. I think this is related to my nerve pain. Annoying! I haven't tried any medication for the nerve pain as I am quite sensitive to drugs. Plus from what I have heard the efficiency of the drugs is not extremely high compared with the risk of side effects. (I don't mean to discourage anyone from trying drug therapy for nerve pain though. This is just what I think about my situation.) Another interesting thing is that my detrusor (bladder emptying muscle) seems to have become stronger after I started doing ISC since it now gets to do the job itself instead of relying on the abdominal muscles. This has made it possible for me to start urination the normal way a lot of the time, however the degree of voiding varies greatly. I try to do this sometimes in order to rinse through the urethra. But sometimes it is better to just do ISC as I have found that my nerve pain can get triggered by contact with urine when the nerve pain is more active. (Doing ISC means there is no contact between the urine and the urogenital area.) Having a stronger detrusor has its downsides as well... Especially when the nerve pain is more active I can get detrusor overactivity problems and since the muscle now seems to be stronger the contractions can lead to quite bad urgency problems... Yippiiie, a new thing to bring up with the docs... I wouldn't mind terribly having to wear protection of some kind, if they were really leakage proof or close to it, except for the fact that it gets hot and sticky and this tends to trigger my nerve pain... I can't imagine the urine would make it better, considering what I wrote above about urine and nerve pain, if I were to have a more severe leakage problem. Thus far I have only had minor leakage issues, more related to strain than urgency. It's the urgency component that is fairly new and that I worry might lead to more severe problems.

To end on a positive note - not pushing anymore to empty the bladder and bowels (and it is possible that the more correct bladder function that comes from doing ISC has had an effect too) - has led to much better contact with the muscles in the pelvic floor and I feel I can now contract the muscles in the front part of the pelvis. I am trying to learn to practice using these muscles instead of crossing my legs and using the "wrong" muscles to keep it in when I have urgency issues. But it's tricky - the force of habit is strong.

Here's a picture taken of me 3 weeks after the surgery. It's now been 3 months since surgery so the photo is a bit old... :)