a big one

I was recently in a hospital for ~72 hrs. Shitting was a central part of why I was there. There’s so much to unpack about this experience, but the big obstacle is that hospital time is quite different from regular time.

Let’s say you're at work. You’re doing your work thing, work work work work work, and then you have to shit. You psych yourself up, pick your temporal spot, and then shit time is the special time, it flows differently from the work time. It’s a kind of reverie, a kind of luxuriating. It’s private, it’s yours, and you can choose to do with it what you want. I usually choose to savor it, pretty much every time. No phone, no productivity, just shitting.

At the peak of my hospital stay, I was shitting (and by that I mean some yellow liquid was coming out of my ass) about every 20 min. Sometimes I would wrap up in there only to get back on my hospital bed, feel that feeling again, and say yeah I gotta go back in there. The frequency with which I shat was like the frequency you might blow your nose 2/3 of the way through a cold. Not luxuriating to be found in that. The quality of time there is totally different. I probably put ass-to-crapper 65 times in that hospital. None of them stand out.

At one point in the midst of the torrent, I decided it might be helpful to take off my underwear & hospital socks (I was otherwise wearing only a gown). That was in the period where the stomach pain was higher, and the casting off of the clothing was like a casting off of pain, or an aspiration to do that. You think about when you’re young and you learn that different people have different shitting rituals, and some involve taking off a lot of clothes. You’re fishing around for something that might help. Maybe it helped a little, hard to say. Mostly, at that point, my body felt fine, but every 30 min or whatever I’d get a little discomfort in my stomach and if I waited, my colon would start to tingle. The watery dump would be out with 2 seconds of getting my ass in place. Another 3-4 min would follow with a little pushing and not much coming out. The kind of status quo you want to alter.

At one point I emerged from the bathroom and said to those present, “pooping really does make me feel good”, or, however you were feeling before, take a shit and you’ll feel better, something like that sentiment. Then came some more painful ones that made me question that sentiment. Whoops. Generally a true statement though as far as I’m concerned.

At one point, my S.O. thoughtfully asked “how’s your asshole?” and, she was amazed to learn it was holding up AOK despite the steady outflow & wiping burden placed upon it. Really no adverse effects in that department, happy to report.

With some targeted antibiotics in my system, the works were slowing down but things were still pretty loose. Before I left the hospital, I did have one shit that was bright green that looked like a cross between a hydra and a floret of broccoli. I was pretty proud of that one. It’s hard to frame these things though. I also had one really nice shit too that I likened to a road that can car, bike, and rail traffic all at once - there was a solid part, followed by a loose part, then chased by some water. 3 in 1 stool!

After returning home, things having solidified a little, I did have a moment where I sat on the crapper for 10 minutes, pushing, and nothing came out. I was humiliated and sore and sad. And I was like, wait, is this constipation? Next time, things came out just fine, but the point is that for all my shitting, I have never really known constipation, and even 10 min of it humbled me. So props to you stopped-up poopers out there, we have very different lives you & I.

Anyway, things are pretty much back to normal now. I took a real big turd at work today. It felt like a solid all the way through affair, but when I flushed, the logs broke into so much dust and algae. It’s like a straw man dump. Ersatz solid dump. I wonder what this means.

PS I got all this by consuming something that had some human doo doo in it. So be careful out there friends!