Urinary diversions or urostomies are often performed for cancer in the urinary tract.
Normally, once the kidneys have filtered wastes out of the blood, they flush excess fluid and wastes as urine through narrow tubes to an expandable storage area—the bladder—and then out of the body. At least some kidney function is essential for life, but any other part of the urinary tract can be removed or bypassed. Because reasons for urostomies vary from birth defects to bladder cancer, the age range of urostomates is wide and many different surgical techniques are used.
Making the Conduit To treat bladder cancer, surgeons may create an ileal conduit (also called an ileal loop or Bricker loop). The surgeon removes the bladder or sometimes just bypasses it. A section a few inches long is cut away from the last part of the small intestine (the ileum), keeping the blood and nerve supply intact. This section is closed at one end, the narrow tubes from the kidney are attached to it and the open end is brought through the abdominal wall to form a stoma .
The remaining ends of the intestine are reconnected and resume their function of moving feces out of the body. If the surgeon prefers to use a section of colon rather than ileum, the ostomy is called a colonic conduit.
The conduit is not an artificial bladder. It doesn't store urine. It is simply a passageway, and urine continues to drip out of the stoma all the time. This means that if you have this kind of urinary ostomy you wear a pouch at all times and drain it into the toilet as needed.
