Ostomy Memories of My Normal

MY OSTOMY IS MY NORMAL.  It follows, then, that my ostomy is normal.  My dictionary says that normal is the usual, typical, expected.  Precisely.  It’s all I know.  It’s there when I get up in the morning, it calls to me after every meal, and it lies down with me every night.  The best day of my life was when, years and years ago, in some long forgotten moment of my past, I came to regard my ostomy as nothing unusual, i.e., normal.  In that special moment, I somehow managed to break free from the trauma of the past without even realizing that I was moving on.  It wasn’t a sudden thing; it was a process, over time, a matter of coming to grips with my new reality.  All of us know that what’s normal today wasn’t necessarily normal a few years ago.  Times change.  We change, voluntarily or due to circumstances.  Normal is not a static phenomenon.  Nor is there any reliable, acceptable universal standard.  Just as with everything else in life, we are our own measure of what’s ‘usual, typical, expected.’  My normal is what I go by, and that’s standard enough for me.  

I guess we all had to embrace our 'new normal' as ostomates. 💩

'Normal' to me is just a setting on the dryer. 😁