Nobody puts “learn to change an ostomy bag” on their vision board. And yet.
I want to start with a confession: when the ostomy nurse sat down across from me in that hospital room with her laminated diagrams and her calm, practiced voice, my internal monologue was approximately this: “There is absolutely no way I am going to be able to do this.”
I am a woman who gets grossed out easily. I have a high gag reflex and a low tolerance for anything involving medical supplies and body functions in close proximity. I am also, as it turns out, a woman who learned to change an ostomy bag, manage a wound vac, administer IV antibiotics, and perform wound care with the kind of competence that would have seemed completely impossible to the version of me sitting in that training session thinking she was about to faint.
Life is funny that way. Not always ha-ha funny. Sometimes just funny in the way that makes you shake your head at who you turn out to be when you have no other option.
How We Got Here
On October 2, 2024, my husband Curtis went in for abdominal surgery. He spent two weeks in the ICU and a month in the hospital. He came home with an ostomy. We spent the better part of the next year managing that reality, wound care appointments, follow-up visits, supplies, routines, and the particular rhythm of a life rearranged around someone else’s medical needs.
In September 2025, he went in for the reversal surgery. I was in the hospital with him for an entire month straight through. That surgery, which was supposed to close this chapter, opened a much harder one. His bowel was perforated. His ureter was torn. A fistula developed. He ended up on TPN through a PICC line and has been on it since.
But this piece is about the first chapter. October 2024 through September 2025. The ostomy chapter. The one where I discovered that I was considerably more capable than I believed, and that my husband was considerably more entertaining under sedation than I ever could have predicted.
The Ship
I need to tell you about the ship.
ICU psychosis is a real and documented phenomenon. When patients spend extended time in intensive care, the combination of sedation, disrupted sleep, unfamiliar sounds, and medication can produce vivid and utterly convincing hallucinations. I knew this intellectually. I was not prepared for it personally.
Curtis, a calm and even-keeled man under normal circumstances, became a man with very urgent concerns about a ship. He looked at me one afternoon with complete seriousness and said: “Babe, we’ve got to get off this ship.”
I have been married long enough to know when to ask questions and when to just go with it. “Of course,” I said. “Let’s get off the ship.”
He nodded, satisfied. Then: “But first you have to cut a piece of the calf and give it to the captain.”
I paused. “What calf?”
He looked at me the way you look at someone who has said something profoundly dim. “The captain’s daughter’s calf. Obviously.”
I sat with that for a moment. The captain’s daughter’s calf. Obviously.
I will tell you that I held it together in that room. I nodded seriously and told him I would handle the calf situation. And then I stepped into the hallway and laughed until I cried, which is a thing that happens when you are exhausted and terrified and your husband is hallucinating maritime livestock transactions in the ICU and somehow that is the funniest thing you have ever heard.
He also saw cats. And bugs. The cats seemed to distress him less than the bugs, for what it is worth.
The Thousand Reassurances
ICU psychosis also means that patients jolt awake, disoriented, sometimes frightened, sometimes mid-sentence about something that makes no sense. Curtis did this constantly. Every few minutes, through the night and into the day, he would startle awake.
And every time, I would say the same thing.
“It’s okay. You’re in the hospital. You’re disoriented. You’re on medication. Everything is okay.”
I said it quietly. Calmly. The same words, the same tone, every single time. I said it more than a thousand times over the course of his ICU stay. I know that sounds like an exaggeration. It is not.
At some point it became a kind of meditation for me as much as a reassurance for him. It is okay. You are disoriented. Everything is okay. I said it until I believed it myself, which is maybe the most honest thing I can tell you about how I got through those weeks.
One of the nurses pulled me aside at some point and told me he had never seen a spouse more devoted. I am not sharing that to make myself sound noble. I am sharing it because in a stretch of weeks when I felt completely out of my depth, someone noticed. And it mattered more than I expected it to.
The Ostomy Training
Let me return to the training session, because I think it is important to be honest about this part.
I sat across from that nurse and I looked at those diagrams and I thought: I cannot do this. I am not the kind of person who can do this. I get squeamish. I have limits. This is beyond them.
That thought lasted approximately two weeks after we got home.
Because here is what happens when the person you love needs something and you are the one there: you do it. You do it the first time with your jaw set and your eyes slightly averted and your brain focused very hard on the mechanics rather than the reality of what you are doing. You do it the second time a little more competently. By the fourth time you are not thinking about it at all. By the tenth time it is just part of the morning. By the thirtieth time you cannot quite remember why you thought you could not do it.
The human capacity to normalize is remarkable. It is also, I think, one of the most underrated survival mechanisms we have.
I eventually learned to manage the ostomy supplies, the wound vac, the wound care, the IV antibiotics. I learned what the output should look like and when to call the doctor. I learned which supplies we were going through fastest and how to order ahead so we never ran out. I became, without ever intending to, competent.
I will not pretend I enjoyed any of it. But I will say that discovering you are capable of something you were certain was beyond you is one of the stranger and more profound gifts a hard season can give you. I have written about loving someone through the long version of a hard thing in a very different shape, my brother Jeff, and what addiction takes from the people left standing. The architecture is the same even when the circumstances are not.
What Actually Got Me Through
It was not a list of strategies. It was specific people and specific moments.
My mother-in-law and father-in-law showed up in a way I will never forget. They were just there. Relieving me at the hospital, sitting with Curtis so I could go home and sleep, being present without being asked and without making me feel like I needed to manage them. That season drew us closer in ways I did not expect, and I am grateful for it in a way that is hard to articulate.
The nurse who noticed. The thousand quiet reassurances that became their own kind of anchor.
Curtis himself, who managed to be funny even from an ICU bed in the middle of a medical crisis, hallucinating ships and calves and looking at me like I was the one who was confused. That man. Even then.
And the Dutch pour paintings I did whenever I got home. Paint and movement and color, no words required. Processing emotions too big for sentences through something that did not need them.
What I Want You to Know If You Are in This
If you are sitting in an ostomy training session right now thinking you cannot do this, I want you to know that you probably can. Not because you are extraordinary, though you may be, but because necessity has a way of expanding what we are capable of. You will surprise yourself. It will not be graceful at first. It will become ordinary faster than you think.
If you are doing the thousand reassurances right now, saying the same calm words over and over to someone who startles awake frightened and disoriented, I want you to know that counts. It counts even when it feels like it is not enough. It counts even when nobody is watching.
If you are exhausted and holding it together and laughing in hospital hallways about things that are not quite funny and not quite not funny, you are not doing it wrong. That is exactly what this looks like from the inside.
Find the people who show up without being asked and let them. Sleep when you can. Do the thing that does not require words when the words run out. And keep the morning ritual that held even when the day around it did not. And know that the version of you on the other side of this will be someone you did not know you could become.
She is more capable than you think. She is already in there. That is the version of growth nobody puts on Instagram, the version that happens in ostomy training sessions and hospital hallways, not on retreats.
If you are navigating a spouse’s serious illness and looking for community with women who understand the long version of this journey, the Enlightenzz community is here. [Join us.]
The piece that goes alongside this one, about what nineteen months of supporting a spouse through long term illness actually teaches you, is here.
Susie Adriance is the founder of Enlightenzz.com, a CFO, and a woman who once sat in an ostomy training session certain she could not do it. She was wrong. She and Curtis are taking it one day at a time, with a 1969 Boston Whaler waiting on the other side.
