chubbaluv said...
I don't have stool passing thru mine, just puss, so I should consider myself lucky.
How do you manually have to take care of that, by just soaking?
Plus I read an old post of someone who had or has 5 at one time??????
I literally cried for that person while I was soaking in the tub and was wondering what is in store for me down the road with this disease.
Let's take a poll of how many of us cry in the bathtub? Yep, best place to have my own personal pity party. That and my car when no one is with me.
Also, how do you function with your job/life when you have to be in the tub 6-10x's per day? My parents live 10 minutes from my office so I can go and soak in their tub throughout the day if I need to, luckily I own my own company so I can come and go when I need to, but I would be FIRED for as much time off that I've had to take with this flare up if I wasn't self-employed.
My 3 kids at home have been VERY patient and understanding that mommy can't go to the pumpkin farm or the corn maze with them with porta-potties this year. Can you imagine sitting in a porta-potty with a drain in your ass and D? Now I'm getting gross, sorry!
I actually kinda massage by bottom where the fistula is and it helps move things through in the bathtub (here we go gross again). So far it works. As far as functioning job/life etc; I am lucky that I work at home doing medical transcription and don't have to leave the house. As for anything else I actually don't leave my house too often which does suck sometimes especially since my hobby/pasttime/stress relief is offroading in my truck and usually that entails 3-5 hour trips and camping. I did get to go wheeling once this year over the 4th of July; but that took a lot of Imodium, some pain pills and sneaking in the only shower at the campground that had somewhat of a door on it and I could actually let the water fill a couple inches so I could soak (that was real fun) and hope noone noticed I was trying to sit down in the shower. 
All in all that week went okay until the last day and I was just glad to make it home.
I also worked at a hospital for over 13 years. I was diagnosed when I first hired there and they kept my job for me. I even quit in 1996 when my daughter was born but they asked me to come back later that year and gave me all my seniority, disability and insurance back as if I never left. My Crohn's was in remission for almost 10 years. I then started having problems in 2003 with the abscesses and went on Remicade and everything went downhill from there. My father passed away unexpectedly in March 2004, I was fired in May 2004, fought for unemployment for the next year and WON, hospitalized in June and then a couple more times before the end of the year, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer the end of that year, I was hospitalized for 2 weeks the following May for a pretty good sized internal abscess that they decided to try and drain twice which didn't work and then returned back to the hospital in June to have my first surgery on the abscess, and now fast forward to January 2007 the abscess was returning again, went in for surgery Feb, got an infection return 10 days later for another surgery and SUPRISE now it is a fistula. I don't ever want to go through that again. The pain was unbearable and believe me I have cried more than I care to admit over this thing. Oh, and in between all that after I lost my job and spent so much time fighting for my unemployment, with no money coming in, we lost our house and had to move also. When it rains it pours!!!! Sorry to rant, will stop now.