During the period of adjustment after stoma reversal, you may experience effects including: This usually improves over time, but it can take several months for the bowel to settle into a regular habit, particularly for people who have had chemotherapy. It is normal to experience urgency and frequency, diarrhoea or constipation while your bowel starts to function again. You should start to pass bowel movements a couple of days after the operation. If the pain is severe and the medication isn’t controlling it, you can ask the nurses for stronger painkillers. If you’re able to drink, warm water or peppermint tea may help with this pain. You may also have abdominal pain/discomfort that feels like trapped wind and can be very uncomfortable. You will have painkillers prescribed to manage any pain issues. A catheter isn’t usually needed, so you can use the toilet to pass urine if you’re well enough to walk to the bathroom. They will return the stoma to the inside of the abdomen and join the bowel together again so that faeces can pass through the intestines and out of the anus.Īfter the operation you will have a small surgical wound with stitches or clips, covered by a dressing. When you have the operation, the surgeon will open the abdomen at the site of the stoma. This helps with controlling bowel movements and managing continence.
This can help to work the muscles around the anus after the surgery. There is no time limit for having the reversal surgery some people have their stomas reversed from weeks up to several years after the stoma is created.īefore you have the surgery, your stoma nurse may advise you to be working on pelvic floor exercises. You may have some tests before surgery to check that your bowel has healed sufficiently and that your anal sphincter muscles are working well. The timing will depend on how you are recovering and your general health. If you decide to have your stoma reversed, you may be able to do this within a few months to a year of finishing treatment. Your surgeon and stoma nurse can explain in more detail what you can realistically expect depending on what operation you previously had. Your expectations will affect how satisfied you feel with the results of the surgery. You may also have had a section of bowel removed, which will affect its function. The operations, cancer treatment and a period of a non-functioning rectum are likely to have a long-term effect on your bowel. It’s important to realise that if you do have your stoma reversed it’s unlikely that your bowel habit will go back to the way it was before your diagnosis.
You may be comfortable continuing to live with your stoma and not want to have another operation if you are feeling healthy and well. Not everyone chooses to have stoma reversal surgery. They can provide you with detailed information about the surgery, how long your hospital stay might be, how long you may take to heal, potential complications, and your expected bowel function in the short and long-term. You can ask your team whether stoma reversal could be an option for you. In this post we’ll focus on reversal of loop ostomies. Loop colostomies and loop ileostomies are usually reversible, whereas end colostomies and end ileostomies aren’t these are usually permanent.
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