If you or someone you know has had an ostomy, you may be entitled to financial compensation. That actually is not true – but, you are entitled to know how to properly clean and care for your stoma in an efficient and healthy manner. Millions of people undergo ostomies every year, meaning that you are not alone in your daily struggles with cleaning and taking care of your ostomy pouch, accessories, and stoma. However, there are proper ways to clean out your stoma and ostomy gear that I do not think many people are taking advantage of. In fact, it seems like there has been a lot of false research going around about different types of cleaning methods online. I have been super frustrated about this because those articles are full of false information and I would hate to see my dear fellow ostomates end up causing damage or complications to their stoma by not cleaning themselves properly. Thus, I have taken it upon myself to tell you how you can best clean your stoma and ostomy gear.
For people who have a stoma, they know that they have to pay close attention to the surrounding skin and skin barrier. This skin is already super sensitive due to all the crap that it has gone through (pun not intended), so you would not want to do anything that could possibly make this skin site irritated or something like that. One of the biggest things to watch out for is irritation caused from your urine or stool coming into contact with it. This is not a super rare occurrence, especially if you are having to change your ostomy pouch quite often. This can lead to further irritation of your stoma and ultimately send you back to the hospital – and we don’t want that! So let’s look at how to properly take care of the skin around your stoma.
To effectively clean this area, you don’t really need to use anything special. One might think that a stoma would require some special cleansing gel, wipes, or clothes of some sort that are specially made for people with an ostomy pouch. Interestingly enough, all you really have to use is warm water and washcloth. Honestly, you can even use some nice quality paper towels if you do not have any washcloths on hand. I know this sounds a little crazy, but that’s the complete truth of all that you might need according to doctors everywhere. If you feel comfortable doing so, you can even use soap or something like that. Just make sure what you use is unscented and mild, as well as easy on sensitive skin. After all, your stoma is literally a whole in your body that is not supposed to be there, so it makes sense that you need to be gentle with the little guy.
Sometimes there might be a small amount of blood that can wipe off on your washcloth or paper towel as you are cleaning everything down there; while this might be a little frightening at first, it is important to know that this is normal! A little blood is no big deal. Like I said earlier, there is a literal whole in your body, so it makes sense that there might be some blood in that area.
Ostomy Basics 