www.incontinentsupport.org

What tips and or tricks have you learned over the years on how to properly deal with having fecal incontinence?

My fecal incontinence is directly related to my paralyzed GI system. As long as I manage my diet and medications well, no bystander would guess that I have difficulty. However, occasionally the paralysis can overwhelm my best efforts to control it; then, I get colon spasms, belly pain, and soiling accident. I take Nullo, and wear heavy protection at all times. My GI medications include erythromycin, ranitidine, Dulcolax suppositories, Miralax, ducosate sodium stool softener, and enemas. Fecal incontinence is the pits; the stigma alone is depressing, and the medical exams for it are extremely embarrassing. I've had three cycles of pelvic floor physical therapy, which have been useful, especially regarding dietary and medication management.

A word of thanks is proper, to Schoppy and to the rest of my friends here.

My profound thanks to Patrick for suggesting this as a permanent topic and to Schoppy for approving it.

The taboo and stigma about discussing urinary incontinence is bad enough, but the taboo and stigma about discussing fecal incontinence is even worse. That makes it very difficult to find useful and reliable information on the subject. This permanent topic should be a great step toward addressing that problem. We all will be able to share our experiences here and learn from those of others.

--John

Rather than have everything jumbled together in one big thread, I propose that, In order to keep our information easy to find, to set up a separate thread for each topic. Over the next few days I intend to begin separate topics on anal plugs (anal tampons) and enemas, both of which are methods I successfully use to control my fecal incontinence. It also would be useful to set up a thread on incomplete evacuation and the various methods we use to address that problem.

There are not as many of us with fecal incontinence as with urinary incontinence, but this information should be useful to others searching for information via Google, etc.

This topic will contain a lot of TMI for those who do not suffer from bowel incontinence. In order to be useful, our information needs to be reasonably specific in order to be of value to those who need the information. However, we should avoid being "graphic" except where necessary. Informative and inoffensive pictures of equipment should be acceptable.

Thoughts anyone?

--John

JD,

Although I would agree about the utility of having separate threads, there may not be enough of us to justify the additional topic areas.

Although I dont deal with bowel incon often, ive dealt with it enough to get smart and figure out that when you take off the messy diaper, if youre not careful, you can get fecal matter everywhere Thus, what I have done is in the bathroom where im going to take it off, i take 4 or 5 disposable underpads (reusable is too much of a hassle with fecal matter) and put them on the floor and cover a wide area of the floor. Then I take off all my clothes and put them FAR away from where the underpads are. The blue pads catch any errant fecal matter and help keep the floor clean. This tip has saved me a lot of headaches, so id thought id pas it on.

Peace out!

Rob

_________________
"We cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love" Mother Teresa

"THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!" - Captain Picard from Chain of Command, Part II

SG,

Thanks for your useful tip. Messy is not a strong enough word to describe a fecal clean-up. Keeping a small inventory of disposable underpads is a useful suggestion.