ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on people who have had major surgery, either urgently as with cancer or injury, who have had irritable bowel syndrome or a related disorder. It also focuses experiences and challenges to self-identity that stomas present. Stoma surgery is an end-point of a serious condition: urostomy for bladder bifida; colostomy, depending on the extent of the resection, for colorectal cancer, an intestinal blockage, and inflammatory bowel diseases. Surgery to rectify this is not always successful, and is only a moment in a prolonged medical and surgical history. A disabled body seems somehow too much a body, too real, too corporeal: it is a body that, so to speak, stands in its own way. Public health education and health promotion messages increasingly emphasize the importance of reporting abnormal body signs to ensure early diagnosis, hence preventing severe morbidity or avoidable mortality.
