I had surgery in November, and I just went swimming at our city indoor pool for the first time yesterday. As Summerstorm said, not sure of your gender... but I am a female, and bought some board shorts at the local Eddie Bauer outlet and then 2 tankini tops and a pair of Nike swim shorts (sort of like boy short bottoms, but longer and a little baggier) at Kohls. Both the board shorts and swim short still showed the top of my pouch, so I wore my ostomy briefs from Comfizz under my swimsuit bottoms, which are made of a nylon wicking material. This covered up the top of my pouch just in case my tankini top rode up. I just ordered a swim wrap from Ostomy Secrets for this role too, but I haven't received it in the mail yet.
I plan to try some Sure Seals, but I am sampling all sorts of appliances right now, so I am not sure what size to get. Even without Sure Seals, I had absolutely no problem with my wafer coming loose, and I was in the pool for an hour and the hot tub for 20 minutes. In fact, it was my appliance changing day yesterday too, and when I went to remove my wafer it was still stuck on like glue... maybe even more than usual because the heat of the hot tub seemed to have made the Durahesive part of the Convatec wafer I was using fuse to my skin. Not sure how other brands will fare, but the Convatec is definitely pool/swim worthy.
I was going to swap out to a smaller closed-end pouch too, but after getting advice on this site, decided to skip that. My normal drainable one worked great. I was actually glad I didn't try the closed-end, as I emptied when I woke up and 30 minutes later when I arrived at the pool for my early morning swim, I already had to empty again (I always have a lot of output in the morning). It would have been a pain to have to swap out a pouch in that short amount of time when it really isn't necessary.
I am going to go to the pool again on Thursday and this time I am trying the water slides:)
Happy swimming!
-39 years old
-Officially diagnosed with UC in 2006, though had symptoms since 1999.
-Had mild/moderate symptoms continuously until severe flare in autumn 2010 which required 2-week hospital stay
-Took Asacol, Rowasa, Canasa and Prednisone to manage flares but meds stopped working
-Tried 1 dose of Remicade but had excruciating joint pain and discontinued
-Had permanent ileostomy surgery 11/8/201