There are many things that each of us finds joy in. Some of us love reading and others love weightlifting in just the same way. They can both release stress and make your entire life better. But there are some things that people don’t think individuals with a stoma can do. I don’t let this get in the way of my passion. What I really love doing is being outside and backpacking. Backpacking is a part of my life that has always given me some of the greatest times and personal areas of growth in my life. When I heard that an Ostomy was scheduled and I was going into surgery I knew that it would not be the end of my backpacking career. My goal was to be me again and find my passion of the outdoors again.
Once you are out of surgery you can then start to think about getting back to regular life again. It takes time to recover. I first made up my mind to get back into it when I got home from the hospital. I took a few weeks to learn the ropes and get past the learning curve. Then when I understood what ostomy gear worked for me I knew I had to learn how to do the hard stuff and be active with my stoma. It took me some time to be able to get a backpack with weight in it and carry that around. I started very light and slow.
I started at the gym and went on moving up slowly from there. It was a long road and was not easy, but I have hurt my ankle so many times that I knew it was going to be some work. So I thrived to learn how to use the right size ostomy bags and the right belts to keep it tight on my body. I found out what gear worked for me and what didn’t. Then once my body was strong enough I turned to the actual gear of backpacking. Yes, I am a gear hound and love finding new things and different ways to use them.
Research led me to many good spots of information and I knew I needed to go lighter. I was going to need to bring more ostomy gear with me and that meant I wanted to offset it with a lighter kit. So I looked into the realm of ultralight backpacks. This also was needed because I didn’t want to risk my stoma gear getting caught on my hip-belt. This was a whole difficult task because to get a backpack this light and without a pack, I needed to go ultralight on all of my gear. Social media helped me and I learned that ultralight backpacking existed. I learned so many things about gear and the philosophy and used it for my life.
Now I use super light gear and my backpack weighs less than a pound. It was amazing to start getting my gear down to super lightweight. My tent weighs three pounds and all in all I can go out and backpack with a less than 20-pound pack That allows me to be able to do this all without a hip-belt and not to harm my body. My health is really going well right now.
Ostomy Health Blog 