Crohn’s Left Rob Nunnery With a Permanent Ostomy. He Built the Drink He Needed.

Rob Nunnery can sit on a hard chair now. He wrote that sentence on October 3, 2026, in his newsletter, The Short List, and then explained why it mattered: a year earlier, every room came with questions. “Where can I sit? Is there somewhere soft? How long am I going to be here? How quickly can I leave if the pain gets unbearable?”

Nunnery is a professional pickleball player with 19 pro titles, a former No. 1 ranking and a place on the first Major League Pickleball championship team, according to his own site. He also has perianal Crohn’s disease and, since January 2026, a permanent colostomy. He documents both, and his audience has followed: 40,000 followers on TikTok when Gut Health Times read the page on October 19, 2026, plus a weekly newsletter, a YouTube channel and a podcast.

The reason to meet him now is a box of sachets. In August he wrote that his hydration company, Flexara, was in its first production run, with a ready-to-ship date of November 2. He built it because the drinks meant to keep him on court kept knocking him off it.

The turn: Four years of fistulas ended with a surgery he chose

Nunnery was diagnosed with perianal Crohn’s disease in 2023 “after years of pain and colorectal surgeries,” he writes. In February 2025 surgeons made a loop colostomy, diverting stool into a pouch so the fistulas around his anus could rest. “The hope was that diverting stool would give the fistulas a chance to heal,” he wrote in his October 3 essay. “They didn’t.”

By the end of 2025 he was living alone in Manila, recovering from knee surgery and still trying to compete. His last pro tournament was in India that December. His colorectal surgeon, he writes, put the odds of another fistula repair working at “about a 20 percent chance.” Removing his rectum offered the best chance at a better life. “I’d spent enough time back where I started,” he wrote.

Four days before the operation he posted a video to TikTok. It now has 9.2 million plays.

On January 29, 2026, his rectum and anus were removed and the colostomy became permanent. “Making my ostomy permanent and closing my bottom saved my life,” he wrote eight months later. “I don’t say that lightly.” His site says the recovery videos drew “30 million views in the first 30 days”; that figure is his own count.

The science: Why fistulas are the hard part of Crohn’s

Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that can affect any part of the gut. In some people the inflammation burrows through the bowel wall and forms a fistula, a tunnel that opens onto the skin or into another organ. In a community study of every Crohn’s patient diagnosed in Olmsted County, Minnesota, from 1970 to 1993, Schwartz and colleagues (Gastroenterology, 2002) found that 20% developed perianal fistulas, and the cumulative risk of one was 21% at 10 years and 26% at 20 years. Most fistula episodes in that study, 83%, needed an operation.

That is the part Nunnery tries to explain to people who only picture stomach pain. “They don’t always know about the fistulas, repeated operations, and permanent changes to your anatomy that can come with it,” he said in an October 18 TikTok caption. A colostomy, like his, brings the end of the large bowel through the belly wall into a pouch. An ileostomy does the same with the small bowel, which bypasses the whole colon.

The work: The drinks meant to keep him on court kept knocking him off it

On Flexara’s site Nunnery tells the story of a quarterfinal in Kuala Lumpur in September 2025, where he and Vanshik Kapadia drew the top seeds, Ben Johns and Christian Alshon. “We won the first game 11-9. Near the end of that game, I started getting lightheaded in the heat. By the third, I was vomiting. I took a medical timeout, went back out, and finished the match.”

Three months later, in India, he drank electrolytes all day as he was told to. In the evening team match, he wrote in July, “I felt pain between every single shot. Split step, move, hit, and my stomach would grab me before I could get ready for the next shot.” His conclusion: “The electrolytes were the problem.” The sweeteners and sugar alcohols that make them taste good, he wrote, are hard on a sensitive stomach. “The only real way to fix that is to take the flavor out.”

Flexara is his answer. The site describes it as “Unflavored. No high-intensity sweeteners. No sugar alcohols. No flavor system.” In his newsletter he calls it five ingredients, “each one doing a job,” built as “a daily baseline, not a heat-day emergency rescue.” He wrote that he made it for “ileostomies and high-output stomas,” then added: “But I have a colostomy and I struggle too.” The company had not published a label or ingredient list when we checked on October 19, so we describe the product only as he does.

In “667 Boxes”, published August 22, he described the first run: “roughly 20,000 individual sticks packed into about 667 thirty-count boxes.” (Our arithmetic: 667 boxes of 30 is 20,010 sticks.) He also admitted he had “failed at far more businesses than I’ve succeeded at,” and that paying the deposit was how he stopped himself from dabbling.

The science: Why plain water is not always enough after bowel surgery

The large bowel’s main job is to reclaim water and salt. Take it out of the loop and fluid losses rise. In a review of 603 loop ileostomies at Penn State, Messaris and colleagues (Diseases of the Colon & Rectum, 2012) found that 16.9% of patients were readmitted within 60 days, and dehydration was the most common reason, at 43.1% of readmissions.

For people with a high-output stoma, the advice is not simply to drink more. In a 2022 review in Frontline Gastroenterology, Jeremy Nightingale of St Mark’s Hospital in London writes that high output occurs in up to 31% of small bowel stomas, and that once a patient is rehydrated, “oral hypotonic fluid is restricted and a glucose-saline solution is sipped.” Sodium and glucose are absorbed together, and water follows them, which is the principle Nunnery cites. A colostomy usually loses less fluid than an ileostomy, and for his own case the only evidence here is his account of what happens to him.

On September 27 he wrote about getting it wrong anyway: a humid morning of padel, cramps on a bathroom floor, three days of diarrhoea. “I can’t wait until I’m dizzy, nauseous and cramping before I decide I should probably drink some electrolytes,” he wrote. “At that point, I’m already behind.” And about the product still in the factory: “I was sick. I was dehydrated. I wanted the thing I’ve been trying to build. And I didn’t have it yet.”

The audience: He says his following grew after he stopped touring

Nunnery is open about what the surgery cost his career. In June he wrote that his therapist had asked what he was afraid would happen if he stopped calling himself a professional pickleball player, and that his honest answer was that the story might get smaller. He also wrote the opposite: “The surgery didn’t end my pickleball career. If anything, it made one possible again.” He said he still plans to play selected events, including a tournament in Tanzania later this year. “That’s not retirement.”

His audience, he wrote, “has grown more since I stopped touring than it ever did while I was on tour,” and most of it now comes for the illness, not the sport. In his study he keeps a board titled Why I Do This. At the top it reads: “Help people with Crohn’s, fistulas, and ostomies live with less fear and more confidence.” One reader message pinned there says: “You’re the first person I found in six years that makes me feel like I’m not alone.”

His TikTok bio lists him as a Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation ambassador, and his press page lists a 2026 public service campaign he filmed for the foundation. He now lives in South Africa.

Where to find him: Newsletter, video and a podcast called Bag & Paddle

Nunnery writes The Short List on Substack each week, posts on TikTok and YouTube as @robnunnery, and hosts the podcast Bag & Paddle. Flexara’s founding list is open at flexara.com.

How we checked this: Sources and method

Everything Nunnery says about his body comes from his own public words, each read on October 19, 2026: his site’s About and Press pages; Flexara’s home page; his Short List essays of July 4, August 22, September 27 and October 3, 2026, plus June 12, 2026; and his TikTok profile and captions, read logged out. The two embedded posts were confirmed through TikTok’s oEmbed service. Career figures (titles, ranking, team) and the 30 million views are his own site’s claims and are attributed as such. Instagram could not be read logged out, so no Instagram figure is printed. The medical figures come from three papers read on PubMed (PMIDs 11910338, 22228161 and 35300464). We did not test Flexara, and no label had been published. Gut Health Times has no relationship with Rob Nunnery or Flexara. This article is educational and is not medical advice.