adjustment period?

I had no adjustment period. Felt immediately very good.

I didn't have an adjustment period either. Two weeks after takedown it was back to life as usual for me.

It's different for everyone. Like the two posters above, the majority of my improvement was immediately after surgery -- within a week I was at my "new normal" of 6 BMs per day. It took about a month for the spasms to die down, and then I had very occasional light incontinence probably through the first two months (e.g. I would wake up in the middle of the night with a dot of liquid on my underwear).

I have continued to notice changes and very subtle improvements over the past ~10 months or so. For example, I did not sleep straight through the night -- ever -- until about four months post-op. Since then the frequency of sleeping through the night has increased very gradually.

Conventional wisdom says that full adaptation of the j-pouch takes a year. Longer term pouchers here will tell you that you will probably notice changes and adaptations for the rest of your life -- for example, it seems like the small intestine's ability to absorb liquid just keeps getting better and better, to the point that many people with older pouches need to take steps to make sure their output is thin enough to comfortably evacuate.

I am seven months into it and my improvements are slow but I had problems after my first surgery which was laproscopic to where my second they had to open me up and find a blockage they could not see any other way to my third opening where I was bleeding internally.
I believe that without those problems and the emergency take down I would have been fine.
But that is not the way things go with me.
I wish it would have been a couple weeks and back to work but it didn't happen.
Richard.

I was very sick going into the surgery, had a three step with one extra surgery for an abscess in between surgeries 2 and 3. It took a year to feel my old self.

Don't let our posts here about problems scare you too much. This is a support group and people come here with problems. Most people come before and after surgery for help and when they are recovered we stop hearing from them.