Fighting grouchiness

This morning I am fighting grouchiness, as I was awoken just before 6am by a bag ballooned with gas. I fidgeted for a few minutes, hoping that this might - somehow - settle things, before deciding that I would just have to get up and empty it. I was lucky that I did: when I got to the bathroom, this is what I found:

That is a picture of yesterday's bag seriously coming away from my stomach. I have to admit, I was impressed that my bag didn't leak, despite 95% of the adhesive on the left-hand side having completely failed. It was actually pretty snug by the stoma itself, I just seem to be having a bit of trouble with the adhesive on the outer edge of the left-hand side. I guess this is probably due to sweat or something? The bag doesn't seem to have stuck well there for about a week now; I'll have to speak to my stoma nurse about it.

Hunger pangs

Anyway, I changed my bag (slowly and very sleepily) and got into bed, only to find that my stomach had woken up and was - quietly at first - demanding food. In addition to the alterations in my sleeping pattern, my post-operation hunger pangs have to be another thing that I find rather strange.

My stomach has always known, and had no qualms about telling me and the rest of the room, when it feels it is meal-time (I once had to excuse myself with a very red face from a tutorial at university, because my stomach was threatening to dominate the discussion); however, none of these pangs have ever been painful. Now, they are. This is probably just because I'm recovering from major bowel surgery (and slight malnutrition), but I'm finding it difficult to appreciate the manner in which my body keeps demanding that I do things (like wake up, when I want to lie in, or that I eat when I feel like my last main meal was ten minutes ago!).

Every time I think things along these lines, I think I should shut up and be incredibly grateful that I didn't have to live with severe symptoms of ulcertive colitis for longer than two weeks prior to my operation, and that tends to calm me down, but all of this is still so alien... So is my feeling grouchy so often. I've found myself apologising to family (especially my dear husband) for unreasonable grouchiness or snappiness more regularly than ever before, and that shocks me, too, because I've never had too much of a temper to ever worry about controlling (!). So many new things to learn! The doctors never told me that one of those things would be how to fight grouchiness!