Transcript
So here's a little tip I have for you. And this is such a common mistake with pouch leakage. What I oftentimes teach our patients: grab my hand, and I grab a marker, and draw a little circle. This is exactly what our surgeons do in the operating room on their patient's abdomen, right? So they're laying flat and what happens is our patients eventually come upright.
Postoperatively, they have a nice round stoma and over time, the abdominal contour changes and their abdomen softens. And what was once a circle and a round stoma now appears oval, so what happens is that we have a patient that starts to cut their ostomy appliance oval and what happens when you take a flat appliance and you stick an oval cut directly over their oval stoma, you're left with a visible deficit, maybe not so visible. But this is essentially what we're seeing. We've got room for leakage.
So what we have to do is actually flatten the abdomen, achieve that round stoma again because that's how the surgeon created it. You cut your round appliance and you make that contact with the patient. You obliterate that space making full contact between the patient's skin and their appliance and voilà—we've eliminated leakage.
