Ascites Fashion

There are six issues you are immediately faced with at home and at work if you are an ascites patient:

1.The water retention grows daily as you eat and drink, so your clothes size changes. They get bigger and bigger till you are being drained, or in medical terms, ‘tapped’.

2.Draining – How is it done? They can also give you a urine bag to ‘drain’ you besides the ascites draining. This urinary bag will receive the flow from the urinary catheter and you have to carry this bag around too.  But you know it is always ‘down there’. And when you sit or sleep, you sit or sleep ON the urinary draining tube.

It is less ’risky’ than the ascites tapping bag. The ascites tapping bag has two blue hooks that allow you to clip the bag onto railings in the toilet and on your bed.   Since the ‘drain hole’ is on one side of the tummy, you fumble around with the tube when you eat, sit, go to toilet or walk around. (See the video I show about where to clip the blue hooks when you are in the toilet in the UM public ward. The railing in each room is different, some are on the right, some are on the left, so you have to remember which hand to hold the hook and which hand to do what.)

3.The unsightly bag – pedestrians will walk away from you in the mall, restaurant patrons in the next tables will ask to be seated elsewhere, proprietors of shops will follow  you thinking that you will accidentally trap the goods displayed with your tube!

One way to be fashionable and not grossing people out: Get an ecobasket from eHomemakers ( see www.justmarketing.info) and put the bag inside the artistic handbag! 

Eco-handbags are perfect
to rest your ascites tapping bag.

4.Punjabi clothes come in handy if you have access to this. The pants are in rubber bands or can be tied with strings, so the waist line is flexible to accommodate your shrinking or expanding tummy. But the colors can be too bright for Chinese patients such as orange, yellow, and purple. So make sure you have many Punjabi friends who are willing to lend you their clothes, otherwise you have to buy these and you might not be wearing them after you get well. Some neighbors may think that you are into Hare Krishnan or a Hindu! 

If the Punjabi top is too small for your tummy or the chest is too tight, then you can only use the pants. Beware of wearing different colored tops with the colorful pants, you can look like a clown when you don’t have enough clothes to wear.  I did look like a clown with my flowering peach background Punjabi pants with small red and orange flowers. The pants are so comfortable that wear them weekly. Several times, my big white blouses or peach blouses didn’t dry in time in the rainy days, so I had to wear colorful tops with the Punjabi pants as my wardrobe was very limited.

Punjabi pants come with elastic top for your
 ever-changing tummy sizes, and the pant legs are baggy.

5.Being discharged with the ‘drain hole’ means ‘managing the water’.  When my tummy was still quite ‘big’, full of water, the peritoneal fluid ( and it smells….) flew constantly out of the tapping hole even though there were stitches. The nurses removed them only seven days after the stitching. So I had to put a towel around my tummy ( that meant I needed Size L T-shirt or Punjabi top), strapped it with a strong under my big blouse or T-shirt, and kept changing the smelly towel when it gets too wet.

When I slept, a big towel had to be placed underneath the body part where the tapping hole was, and I had to wrap a big towel around my tummy so that the water seeped into the towel and not my bed.

And the fluid also drips out of the towel when I sit on the bowl to do my small and big business. So imagine the fumbling around when the string on the towel was too loose and the towel falls. Then I had to hold the towel with one hand while the other one does the right thing!

Once I was waiting in line in a neighborhood shop to pay for a loaf of organic bread, the towel fell off onto the floor. I picked it up and stuff it near the drain hole, but I didn’t do a good job, the fluid started to flow down my thighs onto my feet, forming a small pool of water.  And of course the smell from the fluid is not something an organic shop wants.  I fumbled around trying to find my cash in my handbag while one hand was stuffing the towel under the blouse. 

Luckily, a neighbor was there and she paid for the bread and took me home in her car. The fluid dripped onto the car seat as I was strapping the seat belt. Urrrrrgh, those rushing fluid, they seemed to want to spill out as fast as they could.

6.Creative water prevention – It took my carers and I more than one month at home before we figured out another way to for me to travel and walk around without a bulging towel underneath my blouse. Use highly absorbent night menstrual pads! We taped the wings onto my tummy and use the underwear as a ‘holder’ to keep it in place. 

It kind of worked well with me. I bought many bags of menstrual pads, since I am nearing menopause, there is not much use of them.  Using them for my ascites problem seem right! 

SO what kind of ascites fashion can one derive out of necessity without having to buy a whole new wardrobe? 

You have to have new fashion for:

1. For office

2. Going out in the day time

3. Night functions where every woman wears gowns

4. At home – Big t-shirt 

Having friends who are willing to lend you big t-shirts that match your Punjabi friends’ pants will help a lot. Make sure your friends don’t lend you their teenage boys’ t-shirts with prints of skulls and devils. It can get depressing when you don’t have enough t-shirts to go around. Pregnant friends who had delivered can also lend you some roomy fashionable clothes for night functions especially.

Like me, you may also have to consider borrowing big underwear from your elderly mother, and swear to yourself that you will never laugh at her home made underwear again!

Oh, get used to being naked in your own bed room. With all these hassles of fluid dripping, towels dropping, you can feel quite tired. Spend your weekend in your bedroom, naked, so you don’t have to deal with clothes. Just lay there with the towel or the menstrual pads and enjoy a good book or surf the net. 

By Ching Ching