Stoma Outout - normal?

[lukefarrell]

I have just had surgery 2 weeks ago today and have a permanent ileostomy. I had one temporarily 16 years ago (I was 14 yo) and can remember parts of it but from memory the output quite often looked a bit like what had eaten. E.g. I remember eating a bag of chips and like thick potato like substance coming out.

Since I have had this stoma, every output has been light to dark brown, smells like stool and looks like thick or thin stool. Is that normal? Will this change with time?

its also sometimes dark greenish. Is this bile causing it?

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks - Luke

 

[lukefarrell]

No-one? Dark brown could even be described as black with tinges of greet bits.

anyone experienced similar symptoms ?

 

[Nadia96]

It’s still early as you had surgery 2 weeks. I remember when I had my surgery and the first couple of weeks were really hard. I had a total colectomy and my stool was really loose. It’s normal as the surgeons have played with your bowel and when they do it can cause problems including paralysis of the bowel, which happened to me.

To answer your question, it will change over time. It can usually take a month or two if not more for your stools to go back to as normal as possible with a stoma. For me it took two months. As for the green stool, it’s probably diarrhoea. Even now when I get diarrhoea, it does turn green

 

[lukefarrell7]

Nadia,

Thank you for taking the time to reply - that is very useful. The dark green/black output seems to be in the mornings or mid mornings potentially when there is no food left in my digestive tract so I wanna thinking it could also be bile party ?

 

[Nadia96]

It could be. You might want to ask the doctor if it’s normal. But I’m pretty sure it will just be like this until it settles down