I know this is a stupid question

What is a stoma?  What is the importance of a small stoma?  Why wouldnt a surgeon make it small if it was so important?  How do you stretch out your stoma?  What happens if your stoma is too big?

A stoma is the opening between the pouch and intestines. It is created by the surgeon in
order to allow the food to pass thru the pouch, otherwise the food would have no where to
go but up. The surgeon does make it small and the purpose of this is to keep the food in
your pouch for a longer period
of time
 allowing you to feel full faster an longer because you stay full until it passes thru the small opening. Sometimes a stoma can stretch due to not being made correctly in the first place and another
way to stretch the stoma is not taking small bites and not chewing enough. If you can picture it
a small piece of food passes thru a small opening with ease, while a larger piece of food will
have to force the stoma to stretch out to accomidate the larger bite of food. If your stoma is too
big then the food just falls from your pouch into your intestines and your feeling of fullness
doesn't last very long. Because the food doesn't stay in your pouch very long it allows you to
not only feel hunger while eating but also to eat more food than you should.

A stretched stoma may be fixed either by injections which cause a tightening and scar tissue,
placing a Band over the pouch tightening the stoma in the process or a stiching of the stoma to
pull the threads and make the opening smaller. I have no personal experience with these but if
you research the archives you will find many posts that are negative about these proceedures.
My opinion is to try to research the patients that are not on this web site to get an
understanding of the amount of bad experiences compared to the positve. If you can.

Thank you! that helps!