Following on from my last post I thought I would share our adventure on the way home from WEGO Health’s Rookie of the Year Awards which were held in Washington DC. We had to fly home via LAX, if you have ever been through LAX, it’s my nightmare airport, so much so that rather than endure the stress of a transferring between flights I decided to do a stopover.
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.
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.
An ostomy is a surgically created opening, where a portion of the intestine is pulled through the abdominal wall to create a stoma. A stoma simply means an opening or mouth. The part of the intestine pulled through, along with the waste it diverts from the damaged part of the intestine decides the type of ostomy. The stoma itself has no never endings so it does not hurt, this, however, is not the same for the skin around the stoma, which can sometimes sting if the right appliance is not found. Someone with an ostomy can be referred to as an ostomate or in the case of having two ostomies a double bagger. Ostomies can be permanent or temporary depending on your condition and how it came about.
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.
For Instructional Video on Core Basics Click HERE.
I became a Fitness Leader in 1990 when I realised that my goal of becoming a famous actress was not as likely as I’d first thought. I have worked continuously in the fitness industry since then sometimes as my full-time job and at others as a sideline. I’ve worked as a gym instructor, centre manager, personal trainer, group fitness instructor, course lecturer, anatomy tutor and gym owner.
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.