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.
Like all of us she has had trying and triumph times and I am honored to count her among my friends and fellow survivors. I just love her way with words, jest for life and willing to break all the rules. Not to mention her awesome images and fun family.
On Thursday, April 19th at 8am I will be abseiling down the QV1 building. QV1 is the fourth tallest building in my city of Perth, at 40 stories high and just over 160 meters (525 feet) its going to be no small feat.
As part of this annual fundraising event, you need to complete a training day to assess your skills and requirements for the day as well as familiarise you with the equipment you will be using on the day.
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.
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.
If someone had told me when this journey began that I would be in a boudoir glamour shoot radiating confidence with an ostomy bag I would have laughed at them and then silently cried about it later. It was something I had on my dreams list but didn't dare to think about after getting an Ostomy. It would have just been another thing that would depress me on the list of things I thought never possible again. I hated getting naked and couldn't stand to look at myself in the mirror. I had gone from never being home to shying away from all social settings and avoiding photos where at all possible. Something I only recently began to regret. There are huge gaps in my memory that photos could have helped fill. I never realised how significant a part of my life it would be given all I wanted to do at the time was forget it was happening.
It's ten years on now from when I first began this ordeal, why now have I started this you may ask as I'm not a writer. I was never any good at English in school and my spelling has always been appalling. I even had to change that word to something that spell check could recognise, as my original thought came up with "no replacements found”. My punctuation sucks, I'm not sure when I should use a comma or a full stop and don't even get me started on what a verb is versus a noun (much to my husband’s dismay, he has explained it many times but like times tables it never stuck). But despite all this, I still believe that by putting my story out there it may help others overcome any hurdles thrown in their way.