28/04/2026
Galway resident Marta Stanska was merely 16 when her health first took a turn. The now 39-year-old, who spent her earlier years in Poland, says she began experiencing a crippling pain in her stomach. Her discomfort only intensified with time, and in a matter of months, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a condition that falls under the umbrella of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
“I had pain in my stomach every day, and the doctor would keep giving me antibiotics, saying that it’s just stress or some kind of inflammation of the lining inside of my stomach,” says Stanska, “so it was basically six or seven months of being on different kinds of antibiotics, and nothing would help. Then the pain would spread into different parts of my tummy.
“After that, as it was getting worse, I would start feeling nauseous and get diarrhoea. I lost my appetite, and I started losing weight drastically – in seven months, I lost 15kg, I think, and when I was admitted to the [IBD] clinic in Gdansk in Poland, my weight was 34kg. I lost a lot of weight, and I had really bad anaemia.”
Stanska ended up having an ileostomy, followed by two more surgeries, including a total proctocolectomy in 2019, which involved the removal of her entire colon and re**um. She took seven months of recovery, and was told she will be living with an ostomy bag permanently.
“It impacted my relationship at the time,” she says. “But it doesn’t affect absolutely anything else. I go to the gym, I do yoga, I can swim, I can tan. I can absolutely do everything.
“The only thing I hate is that you have to be really careful when you are choosing your clothing. If you don’t want to show that you are wearing a bag, you need to wear this kind of shapewear under your dress or under your top sometimes, so finding the right clothing can be really challenging.”
Despite some of the difficulties she’s encountered living with her ostomy bag, Stanska says it gave her back her life.
Read the full interview on the Irish Independent website.