Canoe trip with an ostomy

There are a few trips that have really defined my life.  Well they put a solid stance on what I like to do for vacation at least.  Luckily, I was blessed with the chance to go to Canada for a multi week canoe trip twice. These trips were amazing and so very hard.  They were originally just meant to be fishing trips and one of them turned out to be an all out survival trip.  This is something I was still able to do while having an ostomy.  Being out in the wild all out of touch with the rest of the world for weeks at a time is amazing.  Cell phone signals didn't reach us and we didn't use GPS because that was not widely available.  It was a situation where if you did not arrive at the right time they would send people to look for you.  Otherwise you were all alone for weeks.

One may think this is an unwise move for a high school student with an ostomy, but that didn't slow me down.  Instead, I planned well, took extra gear and didn't look back.  It was a good choice because my ostomy did not give me any trouble out there even when things got hard. I want to focus mostly on my trip that turned into a survival trip because that made me learn many lessons.

On this trip we planned to canoe an average of 10 miles to 15 miles a day.  Now we camped for several days in the same place where the fishing was good and made up the time on other days in the miles.  This was all still amazing because we did it with half our gear.  It all started when our first day ended up in a massive storm.

The morning was calm and we actually got 15 miles in and had set up camp in the middle of a giant lake on a small deserted island.  We then set off to fish around 4:00pm and that is when the storm came.  A massive storm front of black clouds rolled in and 120 MPH and above winds came through.  Now we were all in canoes and with the insane waves and stinging rain we all flipped.  Almost all the gear in the canoes was lost and we all swam for dear life that day.  Then we had lost half our food and fishing gear due to the storm blowing it off the island and into the lake. The seriousness of the situation never crossed our young minds because we were all alive and still had fishing gear. I used my bottom half of my real rod and found another person's upper rod. They connected and I used that the rest of the trip. I had 4 fishing lures and steel liners and used those for the rest of the two weeks.

 Each person lost a lot of gear, and our tents were shredded. Luckily, my ostomy gear was safe and I learned to always keep a spare set and in two different places after that catastrophe.  A tornado ripped through and tore up the island and about 40 miles worth of forest afterwards.  We saw the destruction for the rest of the two weeks. My body was pushed to its limits in the water trying to swim and hold on to the canoe and paddles. But we all made it and I still suggest that even with a ostomy you should still adventure.