Paula Sojo: The Crohn’s Patient Who Turned the Ostomy Pouch Into an Accessory
Five years ago she was posting from a hospital ward, eighteen and newly diagnosed with Crohn's after months of being told it was hemorrhoids. Today Paula Sojo runs Osto•me Fashion with her brother, designs the covers her ileostomy pouch wears, and has roughly 370,000 TikTok followers watching her do it. She is a patient and a designer, not a doctor; this is her story in her own words, with the research beside it, as Canada's Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Month approaches.
Paula Sojo is a Canadian patient-creator who posts as @paulasojoro on TikTok and Instagram and co-founded Osto•me Fashion, a Canada-based maker of ostomy pouch covers. By her own account she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at eighteen, during the pandemic, after her symptoms were put down to hemorrhoids; months in hospital with abscesses, fistulas and sepsis led to a temporary ileostomy and then a proctocolectomy that made it permanent, the last of 17 surgeries. She began sewing covers after a family friend sent some to her hospital bed, launched the brand with her younger brother in September 2023, and the company gifts one cover for every three sold. She is not a doctor or any kind of clinician.
On Saturday, October 10, the Instagram account of Osto•me Fashion shared a post with Girls With Guts, a US nonprofit for women with inflammatory bowel disease and ostomies: an embroidered swim cover for an ostomy pouch, for the charity’s care packages. A week earlier, on Ostomy Awareness Day, Paula Sojo had posted a cover of her own: “The most special cover I’ve created yet.” Sojo, who posts as @paulasojoro to roughly 370,000 followers on TikTok, is the co-founder and creative director of Osto•me, a Canada-based company that makes covers for ostomy pouches and gives one away for every three it sells. She has lived with Crohn’s disease since she was eighteen and with a permanent ileostomy since the last of her seventeen surgeries. November is Crohn’s & Colitis Awareness Month in Canada, by Crohn’s and Colitis Canada’s calendar. She is a patient, a designer and a small-business founder, not a doctor, nurse or any kind of clinician.
The symptoms: Probably just hemorrhoids
Her story begins with mouth sores. Canker sores had spread through her mouth and down her throat for years, she told People in February. At eighteen, during the pandemic, with her college classes online, the rest arrived at once: exhaustion, joint pain in her hands so bad that texting hurt, no appetite, drastic weight loss. Then blood in the toilet. Her family doctor, she says, prescribed hemorrhoid cream and told her to spend less time on her phone. Weeks later, feverish and struggling to walk, she took herself to an emergency room, alone because of pandemic rules, was told again that it was hemorrhoids, and was sent home with a colonoscopy booked to rule out anything else. She woke from the colonoscopy to be told she was being admitted for surgery. “I just wish that they were better informed,” she told People. “Early detection matters.”
The video that carried all of this to millions of people is a “put a finger down” clip she posted on October 8, 2025, under a caption of six words: “well that made me out of breath.” People profiled her twice in the week of February 17, 2026 on the strength of it. A colonoscopy-prep video this April reads “Get your checks – early detection is early prevention,” followed by a line most creators skip: “Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.”
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The ward: Six months, seventeen surgeries, a bag
The oldest posts on her TikTok account were filmed from a hospital bed. “someone please jailbreak me,” she wrote on June 20, 2021. What followed, she told People, was about six months in hospital with abscesses and fistulas that let bacteria into her bloodstream. “I’d go septic, literally almost killing me every single time,” she said. Surgeons gave her a temporary ileostomy to break the cycle. By October 14 the caption was “Please it’s been 6 months of this hell,” and on October 20: “I’m home!!” When the medicines could not hold the disease, she had a proctocolectomy, the removal of the colon, rectum and anus, which made the ostomy permanent. “It all began with a Crohn’s diagnosis and 17 surgeries,” she writes on Osto•me’s story page. “The last left me with a permanent ostomy bag.” Her Crohn’s has been stable since, she told People, without another flare.
“I was the only one below the age of 80,” she told People of her ward. Those months, she writes on the story page, “were the darkest months of my life, filled with depression and shame.” The most-watched thing she has ever made dates from that autumn: a video from October 7, 2021 arguing that what comes out of a stoma is no grosser than what comes out the usual way. It stood at 26 million views on her profile when we read it on October 11, 2026.
The package: A cover from Jenny
The first ostomy cover she owned came in a hospital package from a close family friend, Jenny, as her site tells it. “For the first time, I felt excitement instead of embarrassment,” she writes. “I realized I didn’t have to hide my ostomy. I could celebrate it.” To People she put it more bluntly: “I can make this a literal accessory.” Jenny taught her to sew one from start to finish, and she began matching covers to her tops. “Dm me for where to buy the covers,” reads an August 27, 2021 caption with 4.7 million views. Among the comments was the question that became a company: where can I get one? “I clicked on the profile and realized they have an ostomy too,” she told People.
“To take something people are taught to hide and turn it into something they are empowered by.”
The family business: Daniel, El Abuelito and twenty-five tries
The push came from her younger brother, Daniel, who saw the comments piling up. “When I decided to turn this into something bigger, Daniel was the first person I called,” she writes on the story page. “In 2022, we became co-founders.” They called their grandfather, whom the site names only as El Abuelito, in Colombia, where the family is from; by her account he went through 25 tries before finding seamstresses who could make the sample. Osto•me Fashion launched in September 2023, she told People, and its orders have reached customers in 30 countries.
The site, read on October 11, 2026, lists a Purse Cover and Cotton, Satin, Lace, Disco and Swim collections, “Ethically Made in Colombia” and “Worldwide Shipping Based in Canada,” and the rule the brand is built around, stated two ways: “We Gift 1 cover for every 3 purchased” on the homepage, and on the donate page, “For every 3 covers purchased, we will be gifting 1 cover to hospitals all over the world.” A shopper can also buy an $11.99 children’s cover, in bears, bunnies or stars, that goes straight to a hospital patient.
Her feed is the product-development log. In April she wrote that “even the ostomy nurses didn’t know until I showed them.” The Purse Cover, a pouch cover shaped like a small handbag, launched on June 6, 2026; two days later she posted that it had taken 120 orders. In August, in a video with 1.9 million views, she wrote that she had ended up “designing just how little Pau always dreamed of,” and in September a silver disco cover went down a runway on a model wearing it with pieces by the adaptive label Unhidden.
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The month: What November is for
Crohn’s and Colitis Canada’s Help Build Awareness page refers, in its own words, to “Crohn’s & Colitis Awareness Month in November”; when we read the site on October 11, 2026, no 2026 November campaign page was up yet. The charity says 1 in 140 Canadians lives with Crohn’s or colitis. On October 4 Sojo posted a short history of ostomy care, “forever grateful for the pioneers, surgeons, inventors, nurses, and advocates who paved the way,” and Saturday’s collaboration puts her covers into Girls With Guts’ packages for people with new ostomies; the charity notes they ship within the US only.
She has also written publicly about living with POTS, a condition of heart rate and blood pressure, and this March about surgery for endometriosis, a diagnosis that, she wrote, “took 10 years” to arrive after being told period pain was normal. “mindset is everything,” she wrote in September, and People quoted her definition of resilience: “getting up every single day and at least trying.”
What the research actually measured: Fistulas, delay, surgery and the weight of a stoma
In an ileostomy, surgeons bring the ileum through the abdominal wall to form a stoma, the NIH’s digestive diseases institute (NIDDK) explains; the stoma is permanent if the large intestine and anus are removed. About 100,000 people in the US have ostomy surgery of the bowel each year, NIDDK says. Surgery of some kind is common in Crohn’s: a 2013 meta-analysis of population-based studies found that 46.6% of people with the disease had needed intestinal surgery within ten years of diagnosis, against 15.6% in ulcerative colitis, with both risks falling over six decades. Those figures cover all intestinal operations, not only ostomies. Colorectal surgeons such as Dr. Karen Zaghiyan perform them.
Sojo’s complications have their own numbers. In a 2019 study of 414 people diagnosed with Crohn’s in Olmsted County, Minnesota between 1970 and 2010, 20.5% developed at least one perianal or rectovaginal fistula, a tunnel from the bowel to the skin or a neighbouring organ; the cumulative risk was 18% ten years after diagnosis, lower for people diagnosed in 1998 or later, and 18.8% of those with a fistula went on to have their rectum removed. A 2023 systematic review of 101 studies and 112,194 patients put the typical time from first symptoms to a Crohn’s diagnosis at 8 months, against 3.7 for ulcerative colitis, and found that people in the slowest quarter to be diagnosed had 1.64 times the odds of penetrating disease and 2.24 times the odds of intestinal surgery.
The part she calls the darkest has been measured as well. A 2022 UK study followed 1,272 people with Crohn’s through their first intestinal surgery: within ten years, 26.4% of those without a stoma had started an antidepressant, against 33.4% with a temporary stoma and 37.3% with a permanent one, a 71% higher likelihood for a permanent stoma after adjustment. The authors read that as anxiety and depression; it is the gap creators such as Shay Haberstroh, also profiled here, work in. These are population findings, not anyone’s personal case; questions about your own bowel or diet belong with your care team, and our profile of Brittany Rogers, an IBD dietitian, covers how dietitians fit into that care.
The disclosure map: Where her interests sit
Sojo earns her living from the work described here, and it is worth naming plainly. She is co-founder and creative director of Osto•me Fashion, and the covers in her videos are her company’s products. Her link page carries an Amazon storefront and LTK product links. Her feed carries posts marked as ads for two ostomy-appliance makers, Convatec (June and August 2026) and Coloplast Canada (July 2026), and the brand thanked Coloplast’s US account for help with the October 3 cover. She has also posted marked ads for L’Oréal Paris hair care and a pouch-change mirror, and in September a paid recruitment post for a ClariMed device study. She is a patient-creator and a small-business founder, not a doctor, nurse, dietitian or any kind of clinician. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with her, with Osto•me Fashion, Girls With Guts, Convatec, Coloplast, L’Oréal, ClariMed or Crohn’s and Colitis Canada. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from her.