I'm really avoiding a lot of situations over the fact that my stoma is noisy. There are lots of reasons I don't go out much but I don't want this to be one of them.
If it was just stomach noise I could live because everyone has that but this is loud farting from my front and people hear it. I don't want people thinking I'm gross or imagining smells. I'm so embarrassed and nervous about it.
I avoid the gas producing foods and put pads to reduce noise but nothing works. Any tips?
It's strange - I react in a completely opposite way: since long before I had a stoma, my stomach has been incredibly noisy. It's not normal hunger noises that everyone's stomach makes, it's disgusting gurgling and churning, and happens far too often and goes on too long for anyone to consider it normal.
And I am so embarrassed by it. My embarrassment was at its worst when I first got ill as a teenager, and doctors were telling me I had IBS and it was all stress-related and psychological and it was no big deal. Because I was being continuously told there was nothing medically, physically wrong with me, I could only think of the noises as something embarrassing and disgusting. I couldn't explain it to people by saying - "I have this illness". What could I say? "I'm so uptight and bad at handling stress it gives me diarrhoea, and the diarrhoea runs through my intestines making these noises"? I feel like if you have a real, serious medical condition, it implies the symptom to be something that's not your fault; if it's not from a serious medical condition, then it's something people can laugh at in a way that wouldn't be acceptable if you have a serious illness - so bowel problems come into different categories: people deride others for farting; they don't deride people for having bowel cancer.
The stomach noises still embarrass me, though I don't get so very depressed over it as I used to, which was in part due to learning it
is physical and not the result of my personal failings, and in part due to growing up and learning to accept things more. But I'm not nearly so embarrassed by the stoma noises, because it can be so easily explained, and no one's ever going to deny that a stoma is a serious thing and therefore not something to be laughed at. I think I would feel embarrassed if I was in a formal situation and it made a fart noise and I didn't have the opportunity to explain my stoma to the people present, but even then my embarrassment would be reduced by my knowledge that I do have that explanation - that acceptable reason for the noise - even if in a particular instance the people present weren't aware of it.
When I was being told over and over that I had IBS because I couldn't handle stress properly, I felt that my symptoms were just part of me being a disgusting, defective person, because that's the impression doctors and my parents were giving me. My stoma feels like a legitimate reason to have abnormal symptoms - not my fault, not something I can control, not a sign that there's something inherently wrong with me.
