Hello! So happy to have found this group - my first post! I am about 10 days post takedown and while I know it is still very early days, to same I am struggling would be an understatement. Rather than posting one LONG post with all my questions/gripes, I'll try to limit myself to one or two per post!
my first question..... has anyone ever dealt with slow transit time with their j pouch? When I had my ostomy (for 7 years), my transit time was slow/long. I would eat dinner at 5pm, have to empty my bag at least once per night, and still be having output at 9am the next day. I was afraid I'd be plagued with a similar problem with my J pouch and it would seem it is happening. I know it is normal to have a dozen or more BMs each day after takedown. But this amount of disruption to my sleep is getting Exhausting so I thought I'd try a few things to help. The last few days, I've stopped eating at 2pm. A decent size breakfast, morning snack, large lunch, and another snack around 2:30. Now 'large' is somewhat relative since I haven't regained much of an appetite yet. Anyways... not only am I still up hourly (or more) overnight, I don't usually get any sort of 'break' in my BM frequency until around 9am. That's 18 hours to get my lunch and 3:00pm snack from the previous day through my body!
Also, my bowels 'woke up' 24 hours after my surgery. After about 3 days of loose, liquid stool, a lot of my poops are somewhat 'formed' already. Sometimes porridge-y, sometimes even former. I can only assume this is a direct result of my prolonged transit time allowing of my small intestine to absorb more of the liquid from my stool.
Has anyone experienced this? Is there anything I can take to safely speed things up? I drink 2-3 liters of water daily, plus usually a Gatorade and a boost. I even drink lots of water with meals (which I've read to avoid because it can 'push' your food through you quicker... no such luck for me!). I was pretty leery with what foods to eat post op but have started adding a bit more easy to digest fiber to help speed things up to no avail.
Would love to hear from others who have dealt with this and any tips/tricks on flushing things out. I assume it is too early to take any supplements or other meds to help, but if there are any other ways, I'm all ears. I will definitely be bringing it up with my surgeon at my first post op appointment, but that's not for another 2.5 weeks and I'm really not sure how many more sleepless nights I have in me.
Thanks for listening!
