Go hunting with a stoma

Can you go hunting with a stoma?

Going outside and enjoying the great outdoors is part of my life. If you watch star wars you may say, it's part of my religion according to The Mandalorian. But what it does to me is bring my body and soul joy. My personality recharges by being outside and one thing that I love to do each year is hunt. This is because it is a reminder of how life used to be in our country and it also allows me to feed my family with healthy meat for low cost. 

 I love harvesting deer for the dinner table and we eat all year on it. I love being able to do this and when I tell people I do this with a ostomy bag they lose their minds. It is kinda funny to let people know that I hunt with a stoma. At first I was very worried about this and didn't know if I was going to be able to do it. But I was rather silly after my surgery and worreid so much and too much about way too many things. The reality is that you can hunt with a stoma and in some ways, it helps. The first time I thought about hunting with my stoma I got a little sad. 

I realized that I had an ostomy bag on my side and that smell may be an issue hunting. I thought about the fact that in my case my favorite hunting sport is deer and they have an amazing sense of smell. I was worried that my ostomy bag would simply give me away and that hunting would be fruitless year after year. Well, the reality is that I was very wrong. The fact that I have a stoma does not hinder my performance in the woods. It was not an all at once sort of thing though I worked hard to get my body in shape to hunt again. After my surgery, I knew I was going to be more prone to hernias and my body needed time to work up to being in shape enough to hunt. 




 Yes, it is physical and it takes the ability to walk and hike miles in the woods and carry gear up to 30 lbs. It also means in my state that you have to be able to drag the entire deer out of the woods. This can be up to 200lbs of dragging up to a mile and that takes a lot of physical capabilities. So I started working back at the gym a few months after my surgery. I started very slow on walking and then jogging. Then I started to add in some weights in order to be strong enough to do the task at hand. I worked my way up to being in good shape and now I stay there.

 It took time to get the right gear though. I looked for a long time for the bag attachments that worked best with my stoma. I also experimented with size of bags and belts to keep things snug on my body while being comfortable. It was a journey and I made mistakes. But I learned to do it at the gym so I could do it in the woods later. It was a great way to learn in a safe and clean environment. I would suggest trying it to start too! Happy Hunting.

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