It seems like a number of my posts start the same way: me, sitting in a hotel room across from the MD Anderson campus, the night before something significant is about to happen. Tonight is no different.
Tomorrow I go in for surgery—the one I wanted to avoid at nearly any cost outside of my life. They’ll be placing an ostomy bag on my left side, right where the abdominal meets the oblique and about an inch above the belly button. After my third (and most alarmingly in-depth) ostomy training session this afternoon, I think the only appropriate descriptor for all this is: F%$K ME.
There’s no sugarcoating it—this won’t be easy. And while I sincerely appreciate people trying to be supportive (because really, what can you say?), if you think it’s “no big deal,” I’d like to invite you to get one too. We can treat it like matching tattoos—except instead of ink, you get an exit hole on your stomach! I’ll even pay for yours.
I know that sounds angry. It’s not, really. It’s mostly tongue-in-cheek, because what else can I do at this point but make jokes? The education nurse, while kind, seemed oddly dismissive, minimizing what this thing will actually mean for daily life. It’s glued to your body, dangling there after you clean the “hole.” Tucking in a shirt? Forget it—unless you want your waistband to clamp your bag. Exercising? Still trying to imagine how that works with this thing flopping around.
And then there was the pamphlet a second nurse gave me—some guy in his eighties, grinning while wearing what looked like a cummerbund to “disguise” the bag. Nothing says “discreet” like working out in a cummerbund. I’m sure there’s some solution I haven’t figured out yet, but right now, nothing about this screams subtle.
The worst part, though, is what I won’t go into detail about: cleaning the hole and sealing it correctly. If you don’t, you risk—you guessed it—leakage. I had some wild things on my “2025 THIS IS CRAZY” bingo card, but anal leakage from the front of my body? Not one of them.
So, to quote one of my favorite characters of all time—Mark Watney from The Martian: “Well, I’m fucked.”
But, like Watney, all I can do is solve the next problem, then the next, and keep going until there are no more problems left. Tomorrow’s surgery is around 10 a.m. Then I’ll hang out in the hospital, hopefully not hyper-fixating on my new “exit hole,” until Friday or Saturday. After that, I’ll head home to recover until the 28th, before moving to Houston for 40 days.
That’s the plan. But before I get there, let me pause this pity party and focus on what I am grateful for.
The day before I left Austin, the residents of my building—about 120 people—gave me a care package. Inside were handwritten notes from nearly every neighbor, filled with kindness that honestly floored me. It reminded me how important it is to tell people how you feel when you have the chance. Don’t wait. You might not always get another shot.
It also reminded me how lucky I am to have people supporting me through all this shit—pun absolutely intended. And because of that, even in the face of what feels like a massive indignity, it’s not as unbearable as my mind wants me to think.
It helps too when one of your oldest friends tells you, bluntly: “Stop being a bitch.” He knows me well enough to know this isn’t the hardest thing I’ve faced anyway.
So until next time (and it probably won’t be tomorrow, because I’ll be drugged out of my mind and liable to type gibberish if handed a computer), do me a favor: go tell the people around you how important they are. You never know who’s going through some shit too—and they might need to hear it.