I'll never forget Roger. A year before I met him, the doctor in his small town had diagnosed rectal cancer and had recommended colostomy surgery. "No way," stormed Roger. "You're not going to see me with one of those awful bags."
Despite his doctor's urging, Roger refused surgery. He underwent radiation and chemotherapy , but the tumor spread. When Roger came to our big-city hospital and, by some administrative quirk, to my orthopedics floor, he was deathly ill. But he was still adamantly opposed to "those damned bags."
I was scarcely an ostomy expert at the time, but I knew someone with a colostomy—my mother. I knew people could be happy with a colostomy, bleak as Roger's chances seemed to be. So Roger and I talked. Just quiet talk. I passed on what information I had and my own confidence that ostomy surgery might make him feel much better. Meanwhile, his bowel became totally blocked, his pain became agonizing and his temperature soared. The bowel had burst and infection had set in. Too ill to protest much, Roger agreed to surgery. The doctors did minimal surgery, creating a "temporary" colostomy so that stool would no longer spill into his abdomen.
To our astonishment, Roger survived both the surgery and a very rocky postoperative course. As he grew stronger, we started teaching him about caring for his ostomy, created in haste and none too neat. Remembering my mother's experiences with the United Ostomy Association, I asked the doctor's permission to call UOA for an ostomy visitor to see Roger, a real boost indeed. Eventually, still with his "temporary" colostomy, Roger was well enough to go home to his hometown hundreds of miles away, where we alerted the UOA chapter to expect him.
