Long story short last year I won Convatec’s Great Comebacks Award and this year they wanted me to tell my story and hand the award on to the next worthy recipient. My husband and son were not allowed to join me due to adoption laws within Australia, which lead me to ask my amazeballs sister to come to Brisbane with me.
Yes we are adopting! The fertility/baby thing is was too close to home. I have started to write about it many times only to end up in crying so to save myself the tears (happy and sad) and possibly electrocution, my amazeballs husband has not only wrote our story but expanded it beyond my original concept so with out further ado, our adoption story through the eyes of my husband and soon to be awesome sauce dad!
Note: You may want to get the tissues,, if your that way inclined, as even though I tried to save myself I still bawled as I read this.
Better late than never! On Thursday 19th of April 2018 I completed one of the last super scary things I will do before becoming a mother, who know’s it may be my last every optional scary thing I do. I hear being a parent has some of its own hair-raising experiences, so I shall never say never.
I abseiled and ziplined down the Perth QV1 building, QV1 is the fourth tallest building in my hometown of Perth, at 40 storeys high and just over 160 meters (525 feet) its no small feat.
Going back as far as I can remember I always wanted to travel the world, there wasn’t a continent not on my dreams list. As a family we never stayed put in one place for long, first living in an old bus that had been fitted out travelling around Australia getting home-schooled before settling down if you could call it that, moving house every six months to two years until I was old enough to take flight and step out on my own. At 19 I left my rental property, my boyfriend of three years, my job and my family with $50 AUD in my purse, a back pack and a sense of adventure, from that moment I was hooked on travel. I returned just over six months later to finish my accounting and finance degree with the knowledge that I could use those skills, making the world my oyster.
Check out my interview with Geoff, I had the pleasure of meeting Geoff in Adelaide in 2015 at the national Australian Council of Stoma Associations (ACSA) annual conference and in 2017 he accepted my offer to answer a few questions. Geoff has been an ostomate since he was a child. Despite the lack of a bowel as you can see from his responses below this never hindered his life in fact it gave him the opportunity to live life. He talks of sports, dating and what his first products were like.
"When I first got my stoma the only appliances available were made from rubber. The flange (base plate) was stuck to a foam base with Skinbond cement" Said Mr Geoff Rhodes
This was never my face when I first through about dating with an ostomy.
Although I wasn’t actually looking for love in the beginning, it’s something that played on my mind. My charming ex had wished me dead on the eve of my first surgery so my faith in the opposite sex was at an all-time low and in the beginning I couldn’t even look at myself let alone love myself, so how could I expect anyone else too. The fear that I would never find someone who could love me like this was real and being recently single with a stoma was the most daunting thing ever. My mother tried to keep me positive, even to the point of buying me a wedding dress and a cot, all with that best intentions but it all just reminded me of everything I thought I would never have the chance to have again.
September is Sepsis Awareness Month, Sepsis can be a life-threatening condition. It can lead to shock, failure of organs, and in rare cases an ostomy bag depending on where the sepsis occurs and the organs affected. Despite advances in modern medicine sepsis is still the leading cause of death from infection due to the fact that is very difficult to predict, diagnose, and treat.
Travel has always been a huge thing for me, I love visiting new places, meeting new people and getting a sense of new cultures. My husband has said on more than one occasion we would be rich if I could just curb my passion for travel but where’s the fun in being rich if you couldn’t enjoy it. Pre ostomy I had spent six months in the UK working and partying and three months in Thailand backpacking and again partying. I had planned to travel until I was thirty and then settle down with the man of my dreams and start a family. Unfortunately, my body had other ideas and I spent my mid to late twenties in and out of hospitals enduring twelve surgeries which ended with permanent ileostomy bag just before my thirtieth birthday.
I was delighted to get the opportunity to interview one of my favorite Instagram accounts ileostomy_crohn_princess, AKA Wieke from The Netherlands. Wieke is one positive as f*ck, 30-year-old dog-mom to her three fur babies Lizzy, Lotte and Lara. She also rocks an ileostomy bag and like many has crohns disease. Due to her inspiring pictures, love for bikini's and a fantastic attitude to life in spite of the challenges she faces, she has quickly gained over 3K followers with much more to come. Check out her genuine answers below and her Insta account HERE.