An Introduction

Welcome to 'Tea & Jelly Babies'! I apologise for the slightly cryptic blog title, but I'm not especially good at coming up with them and really wanted to get straight onto actual post content. There is, however, some logic to it:

• tea, because that is my favourite drink and has been for years; and 
• jelly babies, because they have, relatively recently, become my snack of choice.

I never used to eat jelly babies, but on 11th April 2011, I had emergency surgery to remove my colon, or large intestine, and now have an ileostomy, which is where they take the end of your small intestine and sew it through a hole a few inches from your belly button. The small piece of intestine that is outside of the body is like a little, red, moist "nobble" and is called a stoma. Bodily waste (or stool, or poo, or poop, or whatever you want to call it; I frequently find myself using the oddly impersonal term "output"!) then comes out of the stoma, to be captured in a bag or pouch that is stuck over the top.

As the colon is where a lot of water is removed from your output, I have been coming to terms with, amongst many other things, having very watery output. Jelly babies are one of the many foods recommended to people with ileostomies to help thicken things up, along with marshmallows, mashed potato, apple sauce, bananas, and smooth peanut butter. I'm a fan of all of these except peanut butter, but jelly babies are my favourite.

And hence, we have "Tea & Jelly Babies".

I hope, within the posts of this blog, to chronicle my thoughts and feelings as I continue to recovery from my surgery and learn to live in harmony with my stoma. So much has already happened so far, but I didn't have much concentration and so didn't think of keeping an electronic diary; instead, I have some scribbles in a notebook that I may attempt to write up in the hope that they are useful to someone (!).