Raising Awareness

Yesterday was the UOAA’s National Ostomy Awareness Day, and they suggested that you participate by changing your Facebook profile pic to their logo and/or setting your status to “Ostomates Unite and Help Place The Ostomy In A Positive Light! Celebrate UOAA’s Ostomy Awareness Day!” I did the latter, because it was easy to do. But it made me wonder what percentage of ostomates are so open about their ostomy that they want to “raise awareness” through their Facebook status? I know that many people are very private about their ostomies.

We have a long-standing cultural tradition of respecting people’s privacy regarding their health, and accordingly, I respect people’s decision to keep their ostomy private. However, I also think that going public with your ostomy is a generous and helpful thing to do. When I think about raising awareness, whose awareness am I most concerned about? Mostly, I think about people who are sick and facing the prospect of surgery. After all, my ostomy is not like a disability where I need the public at large to understand my ostomy and make activities and places more accessible to me. Everything is already accessible to me. I need little special consideration. It would be nice if people were more familiar with it generally, so that you don’t get that troubled “how do you poop?” look if you happen to mention that you had your colon removed. But mostly I share about my ostomy because I want sick people to know that it isn’t so bad. And if I tell a few people about it in some informal way, I don’t know when they might be in contact with someone who is sick and facing surgery – and sometimes all it takes is hearing something like, “I used to work with a woman who had one of those, and you couldn’t tell at all – she wore normal clothes and you couldn’t see it, and I remember that she did yoga, and kung fu, and travelled around the world.”