It is not too difficult to get adjusted to living with an ostomy bag. There is an understandable period of annoyance and adjustment and that’s because you are learning something new entirely. Once you get used to draining, cleaning, maintaining, and even replacing your ostomy bag, you can just continue living life normally again. However, there are two things that you do need to be mindful of when dealing with ostomy bags, this includes keeping the skin and site of your stoma clean and dry to prevent irritation, and learn to prevent my ostomy bag from leaking.
Now, your ostomy bag can leak for a variety of reasons but the most common reason happens to be the incorrect placement of the ostomy bag in the stoma. Your stoma can change in size and form over time. This is normal because after surgery, our body will change, grow and move stuff around, so the size of your stoma can increase or decrease, or just generally change its form and placement. This can cause the ostomy bag to have trouble with its placement and can have small gaps which can then end up causing leaks.
There are seals and plates that you can use to secure and fix your ostomy bag so that it is sealed around the edges. You can consult your doctor to help you figure out what might work better for you. If your stoma bag happens to leak or moves during exercise, then you might want to get a hernia belt or something that will secure the bag to one spot and will not let it move around as you are moving. Ultimately our body size, type, levels of sweat, type of ostomy bag, etc. can all factor into why our ostomy bag might leak.
