Photos: Amalia Osborne
In the months after a life-saving ostomy at 32 years old, Kate Montgomery felt like “a freak with a bag”.
The procedure – that allows bodily waste to pass through a surgically-created stoma in the abdomen into a pouch – took the Crohn’s disease sufferer a long time to accept.
“I cried a lot,” she says. “Every time I tried to leave the house, I had panic attacks. I didn’t think guys would find me attractive and I couldn’t imagine ever enjoying my life.”
But as she healed physically, Kate started to heal mentally too. Almost a decade on, the upbeat personal trainer hopes to normalise having an ostomy by celebrating her body and baring her bag on social media.
“It’s showing the world this is just another version of what a human body can look like and that I accept it now,” says Kate from her Auckland apartment. “After my ‘ashamed era’, I’m moving in to my ‘aggressively hot with an ostomy’ era!
“I’m proud of how far I’ve come. An ostomy was my worst-case scenario, yet my life is so much better now than it’s ever been.”
As a teenager with constant sore tummies and “flu-like” fevers, Kate was 24 when she was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, after passing blood in her stools.
A colonoscopy biopsy confirmed the chronic inflammatory bowel disease, which affects the lining of the digestive tract.
“A gastroenterologist told me, ‘We can give you medications but expect a low-par life.’ I didn’t want to accept that, so I went to a naturopath, whose plan for me made my symptoms more manageable.
“Then I did my OE with a boyfriend where we worked on superyachts in France. When that relationship ended, I thought I was losing weight because I was just sad.”
Deciding to fly home, Kate’s weight plummeted. Her health worsened, and she spent the next few years in and out of hospital.
“One day, I felt this lump in my tummy,” she remembers. “A CT scan showed that the end of my small intestine and my large intestine had become so inflamed, they had stuck together like a ball.
“Two weeks after surgery, I got a massive infection. They opened me up again and I had a temporary ileostomy, where part of my intestine was removed. It was horrific,” tells Kate, who had the procedure reversed eight months later.
“I was so determined to never get another ostomy, I always told people it would have to be life or death.”
Later that year, Kate scored a new job working for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, held in Auckland.
During that time, she was surviving entirely on Fortisip (a nutritional drink) and lollies to get her through.
“My gut couldn’t tolerate vegetables or anything high-fibre,” she explains. “I finished the Rugby World Cup contract, got into bed and didn’t get out for four years.”
Then, at Christmas in 2014, Kate woke with a fever that spiked to 40 degrees. In hospital, doctors found an abscess had formed in her stomach.
The surgeon was blunt. “That is your bowel leaking into your body,” he told her.
When Kate’s parents came in to visit her, the surgeon had dire news for them, saying, “I have to operate on your daughter today, or you won’t have one by the end of the week.”
During the six-hour operation to attach an ostomy, Kate’s bowel disintegrated in the surgeon’s hand.
“I had written a list the day before, titled ‘Things I will do if I don’t die’,” recalls the 41-year-old.
“Included was walk up Rangitoto, eat fries again, do yoga teacher-training and deadlift my body weight, because my bone density was so bad after all the medications I’d been on.”
Incredibly, Kate achieved all those things. As she continued working out and feeling better about her body, she let a photographer friend take pictures of her in a bikini at the beach, with the ostomy in full view.
“And on the second anniversary of my surgery, I published them on social media and was so scared,” she admits. “Yet feedback was overwhelmingly nice.”
With the stigma long gone, Kate describes her journey as having to “put myself back together”.
“I always wished along the way there’d been someone to look at and say, ‘Oh, she’s leading a full life with an ostomy’ or someone to ask questions to about it, so I decided to be that person for others.”
Follow Kate’s journey on her Instagram account.
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