Advice Please - passing bloody stool 1 year after Hemicolectomy/Ileostomy and permeant stoma

Hi Hollyhocks,

Thanks for posting your question, and welcome to the Online Community. I'm sorry to hear about your dad.

This is just a short message to let you know I have moved this question over to our Ask a Nurse forum, where our dedicated team of Cancer Information Nurse Specialists can see it. Our qualified nurses are in the best possible position to give you some dependable clinical advice on this important subject, and so they will post a reply here as soon as they can.

In the meantime, if you would find it helpful to get emotional support from members of the Online Community, I can recommend introducing yourself over on our Family and friends forum. It's full of friendly and welcoming people who understand what it is like to support a loved one through a cancer diagnosis.

If you need any other practical help or support, please don't hesitate to give our Macmillan Support Line a call. The Support Line teams can be reached on freephone 0808 808 00 00, and they're open from 8am to 8pm, 7 days a week.

Hi Hollyhocks,

My name is Keith and I’m one of the Cancer Information Nurse Specialist

Welcome to the online community hope you are finding the support helpful.

On this platform as we are a charitable organisation, we don’t have access to your dads medical information. For this reason, we have limited information re his clinical history. So, for this reason we can only give general advice as everyone can be affected differently by any diagnosis/treatment.

Our general advice in a situation like this would be to recontact your dad’s specialist nurse to have this situation reviewed especially if it is worsening or not resolving itself.

Bleeding in small amounts after bowel surgery can happen but this would usually be expected to resolve itself from about 6 weeks but can last longer.

If he has any ongoing discharge or blood or puss this can sometimes be a sign of inflammation /infection to any remaining inactive bowel. Hence our advice to go back to his treatment team for review.

After surgery/stoma formation initially you may still pass stools via your rectum or pass some form of mucus /blood can be normal for some people or still have the feeling you need to open your bowels may be an ongoing issue also.

So, there may be no cause for concerns here but contacting your dad’s treatment team review would if nothing else put your mind a rest and make sure no further medical intervention would be required to deal with the symptoms your dad is experiencing.

 On this platform it can be difficult to have a two-way conversation and to fully understand what you are going through.

If you’d like further explanation or have any other questions, please feel free to recontact us. Or if you it may help to discuss things with someone outside the loop please feel free to give us a call or contact us via our web chat platform.

take care.

Keith, Cancer Information Nurse Specialist

You can also speak with the Macmillan Support Line team of experts. Phone free on 0808 808 0000 (7 days a week, 8am-8pm) or send us an email.

Ref KM/PW