(bodily unpleasantness, much of it in street language, so likely to be offensive to many readers)
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for terminal August; send in the rabbits of September, and we can marvel (with Stephen Sondheim) Isn’t it rich? / Isn’t it queer? — that we should come to this time of the year
Yes, this is getting out a day late, but I have an excuse. It’s both painful to hear about — involving 12 hours of excruciating pain for me — and deeply revolting — well, literally shitty — so I’m having trouble framing the story for you. Then, as a kind of ghastly sideshow, various pieces of essential software (Facebook is mostly to blame) simply stopped working as they should, making it impossible for me to make my blog postings available through FB. All together, giving the Lost Day of 8/31.
The past is prologue. I wrote earlier about being afflicted a while back with cyclospora or something very much like it, with both intestinal symptoms (brought to bay fairly quickly with meds) and respiratory symptoms (including periods of profound (but painless) laryngitis). My voice would then bounce back (to the point where I could terrorize the staff by singing Sacred Harp music at top power), then retreat to hoarseness, and so on. That’s still going on: every morning I get to discover what kind of voice I’ve gotten that day (today is raspy day).
And then the Evil Ball. We are now up to Friday 8/28. I awake with a phenomenal pain in the ass. A giant hard Evil Ball of feces, lodged at the very lips of my anus, past the anal sphincters (in a past sexual life, I was preferentially a bottom, so this is familiar territory for me). Sitting in a chair was torture.
We have a nurse on staff. She couldn’t prescribe any meds, though, so went for home remedies: a large cup of prune juice, an even larger cup of black coffee. Both which I drank down, in sips, bit by bit.
Nothing. Time to send me to urgent care (at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation). The community has drivers on staff too, and soon one of them — I’ll be writing about him in a separate posting — carried me off, for a monstrous 12-hour stint there, culminating in a spectacular (though entirely understandable) mis-diagnosis that was prologue to two days of absolutely astounding defecation: 15 or 16 (I lost count) gigantic movements in all. I would never have believed that a human intestine could contain so much stuff.
The UC doc had manually removed the Evil Ball (I really did scream in pain for that), then administered an enema (that, at least, was also familiar territory for me), but nothing much happened, and eventually he sent me home with instructions to get some Miralax (yes, a laxative, but I didn’t do it because it was very soon obvious that this was oh so exactly what I did not need).
Made it back to my apartment, at which point the enema kicked in and I pretty much exploded with shit, everywhere, in piles. Vast amounts of cleaning up to do, and I still have to get someone in to scrub my workroom carpeting, which is beyond my (dis)abilities.
And then the shit marathon. (Well, yes, now I’ve thoroughly grossed you out.)
During this ordeal I ate no solid food. Mostly small dishes of yogurt.
But eventually there was no more.
And now the good part. Eventually, as 8/31 drew on, I became willing to try some solid food. Slid into serious food: a spicy rice and greens stew that started life as lamb keema biryani, though it would be hard to tell that now. It was absolutely exquisite, rave rave (I had more of it for lunch today, and it was even better).
And the bonus. 12 hours of treatment brought me into spending time with a ton of helpers, so of course I passed the hours asking them about their life histories, their stories (I offer them a bit of mine, encourage them to tell theirs, and I get wonderful stuff) — great for my research, takes my mind off my pain, and honors the jobs that they do, it’s all gravy. Enabling me to be, all at once, in great pain and kind of jaunty. (Not as good as morphine for pain relief, but not to be sneezed at either.)
And that’s (some of) the news from my penthouse apartment.
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