Reconnection after emergency surgery

Just had emergency surgery in March that resulted in an ileostomy because of ulcerative colitis.
Even though I've struggled with colitis and diverticulosis for years, drugs worked and I believed it was controllable. But my colon perforated, thus the surgery. It took months for me to get back to my normal diet, but now I have no problems with food as long as I chew everything well and stay away from caffeine, and fried and fatty foods.
I am reading, with interest, all comments about the jbags because the surgeon says that it may be possible to reconnect after a year. I'd love to be without the bag, but am really worried about surgery again (9" incision!") and the possibility of things going wrong. I'm not sure that I want to spend most of my retirement constantly healing. Comments?

[added subject]

Post Edited By Moderator (notsosicklygirl) : 8/21/2015 7:30:13 PM (GMT-6)

I have seen a lot of people with j-pouches say they go between 4 and 12x a day. I am sure there are people who go even more or less. With a pouch, you should not have urgency, but of course there are people with better functioning pouches and worse, and you don't know which you will be until you have it. There are risks of the pouch too. I only recently became aware of some of them, but basically, it is created out of the terminal ileum, so if, for whatever reason, you have to go back to the perm ileo after a pouch, you've lost even more of your intestines & that's never a good thing. It's a big risk so if you're not really set on having a j-pouch, you may not want to fight for it. ED is a big risk for men too apparently - the guys know a lot more about this than I do.

It would probably be 2 more surgeries but they may be able to do them laproscopically. I wouldn't imagine they built the pouch with your emergency surgery so you would need 1 surgery to create the pouch, then you wait a few months for it to heal. Then you have the 2nd surgery where they connect the small intestine to the pouch. Then you go through the healing process from that where your body adjusts over the year or so. At that point, you will know whether you are a 5x a day or a 12x a day. Another risk is pouchitis. There are cases of chronic pouchitis which is a lot like having UC in the pouch. You could have a lot of UC-like symptoms if you ended up with that. We have a member where, ks, who has it though and manages it very well with antibiotics and he has no regrets about having surgery or his pouch.

Bye Bye
Whether you have a j pouch or ileo you said it all when you said

"It's the quality of life "

AMEN
DAN