J-pouch Life

I’m  glad that so many of you wrote in with questions — information on Jpouch surgeries and followups is hard to come by, especially when the information you are looking for is so seemingly random or mundane that you never ask your surgeon. I think I’ll do a separate post for each of the questions [...]

Here’s the deal: my wife is a doctor, I hang out with doctors all the time. Sometimes I hang out with nurses and PAs too, but mainly doctors. I’m a web architect and technology enthusiast. So let ‘er rip: medical questions you can’t find answers to on Google? I gotcha covered (and by me, I [...]

I know, I know, sexist, classist, beautist, racist, and all that. Why am I posting it? Because it’s true. We should have a line of posters that we create here at Jpouch.net – they could say things like “rock stars, they get diarrhea too.” “World Leaders, yes, they get IBD too” “The janitor at your [...]

I’ve been on the east coast this week visiting my 93 year old grandmother. It feels great to be able to help out with the family again, especially after needing so much help through the three jpouch surgeries last year. I’m definitely more patient with other people now, and I feel I’m a better care-giver. [...]

I don’t think we can stress enough how important your comments are to us! On 148 posts, we’ve had a whopping 578 comments. Keep ‘em coming! This week we expressed our sympathies to Mike, who had some bad news. In response to that, if you have some relationship stories you’d like to share, please post [...]

I’ve just returned from a post-surgery follow-up (more hyphens anyone?) with my surgeon. I scheduled the appointment because I noticed something squishy around my incision. Since all my friends happen to be doctors, they all told me it was an umbilical hernia. In my nicely ignorant state of medical knowledge (with apologies to my wife [...]

Reading Abby’s update from yesterday made me realize: there’s no Wikipedia page for pouchoscopy! This might not seem like a big deal, but when you consider that Wikipedia results are typically in the top 3 on Google for any term-specific search, you can begin to see why it’s important. Well, luckily it’s a wiki, so [...]

After I had Step Two of my three surgeries, I was expelling waste rather quickly. Too quickly, it seemed. I was afraid I couldn’t adsorb anything so my surgeon recommended chewable vitamins. Although they seem childish, you can absorb them better because you’ve chewed them first! Even now, after takedown, I still take 2 chewable [...]

Click on the images to see them at their full resolution. After getting out of the hospital for Step One, my wife’s co-worker gave me this card, which is illustrated by his kids. Everyone was worried I would have a negative reaction, be offended, and all that. I loved it, I laughed and laughed. You [...]