I’ve really been racking my brain over how to get these ostomy liners to work for me – especially after having to use a porta-potty and a very awkward public washroom over the weekend.  

I feel like pouch liners would have come in handy.

So I reached out to get some advice on how to use them without running into the problems I had previously. Someone with an ileostomy, who’s had luck with liners, told me to simply cover the stoma while you’re replacing the liner, and you’ll be good to go.  

I suspect that this would be a great idea, considering that I “wrap” my stoma when I’m doing a wafer change, and it’s quite clean and convenient.

But two things were really getting to me…

These liners are plastic – they do not break apart in water and would get trapped somewhere, like in your own plumbing or at the municipal water treatment plant.  Neither of those sounds good to me, and I’d like to keep my environmental footprint as low as possible if I can.

Another problem is that the toilet paper offered in public washrooms aren’t very good – they are often thin and very difficult to manage (i.e. hard to use dispenser).  

I could bring toilet paper from home, but that would cause more issues – toilet paper isn’t the best thing to wrap your stoma with, as the paper breaks apart and sticks.

When doing a wafer change, I usually wrap gauze around my stoma and discard the gauze in the trash bin.  

This would seem to be a good idea in public, but the porta-potty I used didn’t have a garbage bin and the public washroom I used would have required that I walk around with a messy gauze to discard it in the trash bin…

Doing some research, I thought that biodegradable, flushable baby wipes might be a great solution – until I started reading about horror stories from people who’ve paid out thousands to get their drains unclogged because of those wipes.

Even the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada did their own tests to see how “flushable” these wipes are, and they concluded that they really aren’t – and they warned citizens not to flush them.

So I’m here, without a good solution for those times when I’m out in public and need a SIMPLE, COST EFFECTIVE and CONVENIENT solution to discarding my pouch contents.  

I was thinking of using a closed pouch for when I’m out of the house, but they are not cheap, especially when emptying up to 7 times a day!

I’m a very sad panda right now :(