There’s been a fruit fly surviving the winter in the bathroom for the last month. I usually notice it when it’s resting on the curtainless, eye-level window facing the backyard. Why the bathroom? Well, more water sources for one. Plus, I have the habit of leaving cups in there – sickly sweet coffee dregs, aromatic cranberry juice fumes – not bad food for a measly fly.
Early morning surgery day, I stumble to the toilet and start my flow before halting it in shock. The fruit fly is floating along the liquid edge of the bowl. I have followed my if-it’s-yellow-let-it-mellow rule, so this survivor is drowning in my day-old piss. I panic.
There’s a sugar-crusted spoon lying in a drained coffee cup; I take the spoon and dip it in the toilet. The limp fly body and a few droplets of diluted urine finally come up with a spoonful. I attempt to put the spoon concave-side up, but the fly-in-center globule has slid to the other side. I lay the spoon carefully on its rim and start blowing gently over the convex side. The fly hangs over the rim and a leg and wing begin to twitch. I rub my hands through my hair and grip the tips and remember that I really need to pee. The fly is shaking a wing vigorously as I slip on my ARMY shirt and get ready to leave – that little bastard better be back up on that window when I return.
Five days later, I’m back in the bathroom having another panic attack. Someone has been adding little pumps of air to the bulging balloon in my stomach. I can’t breathe. I can’t burp. I can’t fart. I keep expecting my foot-long surgical cut to reopen and tear further, split me apart and offer sweet release. My bowels aren’t working. The shifts and twists that my intestines underwent during surgery have caused them to fall into temporary hibernation. Think of a huge, extremely shy slug; if you touch it, then it holds its breath for days and refuses to budge.
What is your personal limit? Mine turned out to be a little over a hundred hours.
I woke up in the recovery room with a nurse named Dawn.
“Annnd how are you?” I chuckled. Like last time, this was good anesthetic. Dawn was blonde, doe-eyed, cute, and competent. She handed me a contraption that looked as if it had resulted from a misunderstanding between a penis pump, a huge bendy straw, and a drink pitcher. Dawn instructed me to suck slowly on the tubular part. As I did that, a blue ring rose in the penis pump cylindrical middle. The cylinder had horizontal blue ruling running from 0 to 2500 in 250 ml increments. I inhaled, and there was a rattling – this came from a flat, plastic extension to the side of the cylinder; it contained a hollow groove with a blue bullet indicator. “KEEP INDICATOR BETWEEN ARROWS” a pair of arrows off to the side yelled.
I more or less stayed in the range indicated by the arrows and made it to 2500 ml. Again. I wanted to Dawn to watch and be impressed. Again!
“I think that’s enough.” The voice didn’t come from Dawn - she was helping an older patient further down the room. The voice came from my right side, and I realized that I hadn’t been holding the breathing contraption during any of my violent inhales. My Mom and Dad were there, although I couldn’t tell which one was holding McBreathey.
“Here take a look at your scar. The Doctor did an awesome job, even put his initials on there,” my Mom said. Someone lifted my gown over my stomach. I didn’t care to look, but I could tell that it was important for the people gathered around me. I couldn’t look. Trying wasn’t painful; I simply couldn’t do it – the sensation reminded me of the time I had fractured my neck; I couldn’t turn my head to the left to save my life. Now, I couldn’t crane my neck or lift myself up enough to stare at my stomach.
I had given my Mom three numbers to call: my ex- girlfriend and two very good friends from college. All women – I think there’s some psychological, evolutionary bent to that for me as a guy. Regardless, it was nice, and I knew that they’d tell all my guy friends. The only person I spoke to over the phone was my ex-girlfriend.
“Annnd how are you?” I asked.
“Fine. How are you doing, babe?” she said.
“Annnd how is your butt?” I continued.
“It’s fine too. I’m glad you’re OK. I love you,” she said.
“I love you too. Bye.” That was about all we said – not because it was emotionally painful but because I was out of breath. I reached for McBreathey. I was only able to get to 2250 ml that time, just a notch from the top. I spent the next few hours in the recovery room, alternately staring at Nurse Dawn and sucking on McBreathey.
I can’t remember much about the trip to the patient room – just traveling through tunnels and my Dad occasionally zipping past on his Segway. The patient’s room bed was twenty times better than the gurney; it was partial memory foam and air mattress which would adjust as I readjusted.
The Nurse who came in reminded me of my overweight cousin. She had this half-sadistic, half-commiserating look that basically said “hurt, don’t it?” She knew her shit, and she was the person who calmed me when I thought that I was suffocating. It was the morning after the surgery, and McBreathey only registered 500ml. I inhaled and rattled the blue indicator until my sternum should have cracked and my stomach burst. I couldn’t get past that 500ml line. I began to breathe faster and got dizzy; when I began to fall asleep, I jerked myself awake because I could feel my lungs shutting off. This went on for a few hours until I started gasp-complaining to my Mom, who’d spent the night next to my bed even though the room had smelled like vomit from the previous occupant. We hit the call button on the bed and Nurse Cousin came in.
“You’re breathing too fast. We’ll take your pulsax,” she said. From what I could gather, pulsax was a machine that took my blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, and oxygen intake. My intake was 94%.
“See 94% - you can breathe and you’re getting plenty of oxygen. Sit back. Breathe easy. Push this pillow against your stomach. You’re fine,” she said. I wasn’t convinced but did as I was told. I rediscovered the back of my chest and the base of my stomach. I felt my air just barely touching those regions and that was enough. Nurse Cousin’s seemingly indifferent approach had pulled me back from panic. I could sleep for a half-hour at a time before taking another hour to get comfortable and another hour to relax enough to sleep for another half-hour. And so it went for the next day.
Part of the recovery process was staying mobile. Every few hours I would need to get out of bed and walk. Outside my room was a linoleum-lined laneway that terminated into an atrium centered on a circular counter. I walked around this circular arrangement three times with my Mom on one elbow and a caretaker/Nurse’s assistant on the other with my IV pole leading the way. I was attached to the pole in two ways, a needle stuck in the back of my hand and a tube trailing from my penis.
The catheter was another interesting gadget on my way to recovery, and I was terrified of tripping over it whenever I left the bed. Every move had to be carefully planned. I found that it was easier to rearrange my body by grabbing the headboard of the bed and dragging myself into position. Any movement that involved using my abdominal muscles was wishful thinking. I discovered this the first time I tried to get into bed by bending back at the waist. I would’ve shrieked but the tightness in my stomach made it come out as a muted groan.
Anyway, let’s get back to the tube trailing from my penis; that was the first thing that I focused on when I could walk to the sink and lift up my gown to inspect my scar. The incision was fine, covered in bonding glue with slight bruising branching out from either side, but the catheter tube turned my penis into a fat, gnarled, wrinkled thumb. The third time I got out of bed, my Dad stopped me because I was bleeding. It looked as if someone had went crazy with red food dye on the linoleum floor, scattered droplets unable to dissolve and now forming a collective splotch. It ran down the catheter tube, and we surmised that the inside of my dick was bleeding.
My favorite nurse, Amber, a 24-year-old sunflower with an unassuming professionalism, came in to check the attachment. “I’m glad you’re not shy, since that would make things more difficult,” she said as she inspected my bloody crotch.
“Well, it’s probably better that you’re not shy,” I replied.
“Oh yeah, you have to get used to the visuals and it not belonging to your husband. It comes up more times than you’d think,” she said. Amber was right; I wasn’t shy. I was only slightly humiliated by the withered state of my penis and my saggy left nut. I wanted to say something like “it’s usually more proportionate”, but that would have sounded desperate. Instead, I relaxed when Amber told me that the bleeding wasn’t coming from my catheter; a few inches above my crotch, the last few stitches of my incision had burst.
That catheter wasn’t coming out until I delivered 250ml of pee every 6 hours. The caretakers (basically Nurse assistants) and the occasional Nurse would shake their heads and frown when they came in to empty my urine container. I was not meeting my quota and my urine was too dark. They kept giving me the same volume of IV drip for the next day and a half, and, surprise, my urine was still not enough.
Now, in the event of complete global collapse and a drought, I will be the first to steal your water and will keep guzzling it until you round up your post-apocalyptic posse and shoot me to death upon having reinvented the compound bow. When I try to block your primitive arrows with my chain-blade-baseball bat of unerring justice, my bludgeon of untold wisdom will slip from my sweaty palms. Yes, I sweat a lot, and I drink a lot of water. I’m not sure why this is so and I don’t really care. I simply drink more water than the average man. I tried to tell the caretaker-nurse teams as such in more diplomatic terms. I don’t think we quite connected so nothing changed.
Part of the frustration was that I couldn’t drink any fluids while the catheter was in place, the worry being that I’d vomit and split my scar. Perpetual cotton mouth haunted me for the first 36 hours; I was allowed to suck on ice chips or swab my mouth with a large, Styrofoam version of a Q-tip, but I eventually had to spit out any precious moisture.
Each morning the doctors would visit, and they would always follow the same order: the youngest resident first; the more handsome trainee doctor with facial hair, who looked like the first one’s older cousin came second; and finally, Dr. Chang, the man who had cut me up with expert precision. Dr. Chang was in a conference in Florida for the next 23 hours, so I spoke to the second-in-command.
“Hey, I need more water than most people. Water’s good, I like it. Can we get more water bags pumped in so I can get rid of my man-bag? More out equals more in – well the other way around, but it’s the same really. Can I have more water?” I rambled on, under the conversational effects of my morphine drip. This doctor had met with me before the surgery and had spoken about the catheter, informing me that I should cradle it during my walks and anticipate any snags; it would be my man-bag that must be held close.
“Yeah, we should be able to manage that and maybe get that out in the next day,” he replied. When I received double IV bags a few hours later, I started to realize that the hospital was just another form of bureaucracy; my direct caretakers followed predetermined orders, and the people who issued orders weren’t giving the direct care. Perhaps this is an optimal system, but I wasn’t enjoying myself.
Anyway, the double dose of IV bags led to more, less dark urine. I was soon cleared to have the catheter taken out. Have you ever had a particularly sticky band-aid ripped from your skin? Do you have a penis? If the answer to both of these questions is yes, then imagine someone ripping off a band-aid from inside your junk- it was totally worth it. The act of peeing under my own volition, even though it sometimes took minutes to coax the flow into action, was intoxicating.
I could breathe again (still couldn’t get past 1500ml on McBreathey, but it was a world of difference) and I could pee; the next step was eating. For some strange reason the internal organs don’t respond well to foreign hands shifting them about, so my stomach and intestines took a leave of absence to protest this unsolicited fondling.
My morphine drip allowed for me to control it manually; I could click the button attached to a cord attached to a vial attached to a monitoring system. Each button push corresponded to 1mg of morphine, and the system would override any manual attempts for the next eight minutes after delivery. I went through 67mg of morphine in 3 days, and Dr. Chang would chide me that I wasn’t using enough and press the button as he looked at my scar. I hit my peak-drip stride on the second day and then tapered off when I found out side effects included difficulty breathing and constipation. I remembered that there are different kinds of physical pain: sharp, flaring pain, which includes scrapes and cuts (my favorite); tingling, progressing-to-numbness pain, which includes bruises and muscle aches; and pure discomfort that can’t be embraced or medicated, an itch that can’t be scratched, continuous murmurs rather than punctuated screams – I tried to avoid this last type at all costs.
Part of the agreement of being given semi-solid food was that I’d transition from the morphine drip to oral pain medication. I had only gone through 17mg of my final morphine vial when it was removed; I was saddened that 13mg of awesome pain medication would be going to waste, but I was looking forward to a change in routine. I switched to Percocet; one of the side effects turned out to still be constipation. This was balanced out by milk of magnesia and suppositories; one nurse was squeamish about administering suppositories, so I took the small joy of wiggling my butt suggestively. Hospital meals consisted of sweet tea, broth, jello, and something that couldn’t decide whether it was tapioca, pudding, or yogurt. In my addled state, I thought the last one was delicious; I’d be thinking of the cinnamon, sickly sweet taste when my scar rippled and I vomited several days later.
I was beginning to be able to pee within a minute or less of attempting but no poop. I’m a firm believer in pooping at least once if not twice day; it’s a time to reflect and discard the parts that aren’t doing a body any more good. I hadn’t pooped in 4 days; I felt useless. In preparing myself for the surgery, I had imagined my body becoming streamlined from a limited diet and grimacing good-naturedly at the occasional bouts of ripping, abdominal pain from my deadly scar. Instead, I looked 6 months pregnant as my body accumulated gases and the dull ache in my back and joints overshadowed any respectable twinges of pain. My stomach grew while the occasional dribble of diarrhea or fart offered a teasing promise of further release to come.
And there it was – more discomfort. I had relearned how to breathe and pee in less than 3 days, but my bowels betrayed me. I tried to jumpstart them into action by increasing the length of my walks around the circular desk that my Mom called RoundWing. We started with 3 laps around RoundWing; the next time it was 6, then 9, then 12, then 15. I didn’t do those laps alone. I leaned on my IV pole and either my Mom or Dad would walk alongside me. 15 laps turned out to be too much, and I stayed at about 9 laps plus a walk down and back up the corridor for the rest of my stay. After they took out the IV and my catheter, I could lean on a parent’s shoulder and eventually remembered how to walk on my own.
The stay at the hospital wasn’t entirely bad. My parents were around frequently with my Dad doing the day shift and my Mom staying overnight. There was a TV in my room, and my favorite channel showed nature footage while playing orchestra music. I got to be doped up on top-notch pain medication, and I had phone and text conversations with friends. Some of the Nurses and caretakers were delightful people with senses of humor and natural compassion. I also got to go on my strolls. I’m saying this to try to sugarcoat the fact that I wanted to murder one hospital worker.
She was a social worker who was absolutely useless. “You’re breathing kind of hard, are you OK?” she’d say as I walked past her section of RoundWing. I don’t know if she grasped that walking was challenging with a foot-long, healing scar and that it was a necessary part of the recovery process, recommended by every Doctor. As I began to eat bits of gelatinous food and bloat, my blood pressure went up, and my pulse, which had been over 100 bpm since the first day, climbed to 120 bpm. It was my fourth day in the hospital, and I had decided to finally take a shower with my Dad’s help. I needed something to cover the IV attachment in the shower. (The attachment was left in just in case I need to be hooked up to anything else. I eventually ripped this out, since it struck me as a lazy practice and blood had already clotted in the tube.) Unfortunately, the first person my Dad asked about this was the social worker. She followed him back into my room. At that time I thought she was a Nurse Practitioner because she didn’t seem to make as many rounds as the regular Nurses, and why would someone offer their medical expertise if they weren’t qualified to do so?
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Are you sure you’re OK, because your blood pressure has been very high for the last day?” she continued.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said.
“Because your blood pressure being that high could be bad. Are you sure that you’re alright?” Perhaps by switching out ‘OK’ with ‘alright’, she was hoping to trick me into revealing the true depths of pain, the sort of pain that only a person whose medical experience ranged between zero and zilch could fix – my savior! I felt my blood pressure rising.
I reached out to pat her on the shoulder but my hand somehow found its way around her neck instead. My other hand joined in, and then she was on the ground. I squeezed and squeezed while her face went dark red and her stupid, bulging eyes still tried to comprehend what was taking place.
“Are you OK because you’re being strangled? Does your windpipe feel odd? How’s your blood pressure doing? Are you OK/doing fine/getting better/fucking alright!?” Each question was punctuated with a crack, me sense-smacking her head against the floor.
I imagined this and stared into her dumbly thoughtful eyes, hoping that she could see her own death reflected in mine. She didn’t get it.
“Well, let us know if you’re not doing OK, OK?” she said.
“Sure, is there something to cover my IV so I can take a shower?” I asked.
“Oh right, a caretaker will bring that to you. Will you need their help showering?” she asked.
“No, my Dad was going to help,” I replied. (My Dad did actually help me shower, and he said that I would have to do the same for him when he gets too old to do it himself – shit.)
“Oh, I’m sure you’re looking forward to that.” She frowned when I rolled my eyes. I had been classified as one of those unappreciative patients who would only realize her heroic gestures many months later.
A nice part about losing a nut and being split apart is I’m trying to spend less time interacting with stupid people and more time savoring my self-righteous fury. I could complain about other minor instances until I sprout a new right nut, but I think I’ve struck the right balance for now, so let’s move on.
On February 12th, I was cleared to leave the hospital. The swelling in my stomach kept increasing, but I’d made a few plops which might be called bowel movements. The ride from the Hospital back home should’ve have been about 2.5 hours. We made it back in considerably less time than 2 hours; my Dad took most of the trip at 95mph and would cut off cars in the left lane trying to pass trucks in the right lane so that we could cut off both with an S-shaped swerve; I think he was trying to help me shit myself. We stopped once at a rest area. I walked to a urinal. I had been standing there for about a minute when an old man walked in. He took up his position several urinals down and we both stayed that way for another two minutes, locked in our communion of silence. He left his urinal a few seconds after I left mine; we had tried.
At home, I paced while prodding my stomach. My Mom left to fill my Percocet prescription, and I begged her to buy some enemas for me. The enemas turned out to be little squeeze bottles that I had to insert into myself while pressing my face into the floor – they helped? I took two Percocets and a Lunesta and tried to sleep. I was too restless and kept pacing and prodding. My Mom came in to check on me, told me I was being crazy, said we should go to another hospital for a pain shot, and told me I had to rest. We sat that way for a few minutes, feeding off of each other’s crazy until she asked me what I wanted.
“I want it to stop. I just want to take a simple shit. I am so goddamned tired of being uncomfortable,” I sobbed. At first I tried to stop crying – I hadn’t done any of that in the hours leading up to my surgery or during my hospital stay – but then I kept trying to sob when I realized that the undulations might jumpstart my bowels. When I wanted to, I couldn’t do it. I locked myself in the bathroom for the next 3 hours.
When I couldn’t do it, I wanted to. I began to understand that this held true for my simple bodily functions; a smidgeon of poop would have been magical. For the first hour there was nothing. I leaned against the toilet and smacked the wall. There was movement to my side, above the sink. It was the bathroom fly – it had survived. I chuckled and could pee just a little. I also found out that if I could concentrate on peeing, then I could sometimes poop a little. The next two hours were spent trying other tricks; if I bent my knees slightly and pushed my palms against my shins while holding my breath and straightening up before raising my arms over my head and then back to my chest before squatting suddenly, then I could sometimes manage a fart or a burp. I went through different combinations of these movements and would occasionally see the bathroom fly flitting from surface to surface.
One idea I’ve come to believe to be bullshit is that suffering magically makes us better people. I think this notion can lead to the assumption that more suffering is good for us, that a certain level of misery translates into divinity. I had a diagnosis, an unexpected surgery, an expected surgery, trouble breathing, trouble peeing, and trouble pooping, so now you must address me as lord-shaman. But wait, what if my housed had burned down or I had lost a loved one during all this? Would that make me the arch-duke-high-Sunday-priest-you-have-no-idea-what-I-have-been-through guy? When suffering is given a rank, a badge, it becomes meaningless. So is there some way to attach worth to an experience that I’d rather not go through again?
The bloating got better over the next few days, and it was never as uncomfortable as on that first day coming home. In the weeks since, I’ve saved the bathroom fly at least a half dozen more times. I’m not sure if it’s the same one because now there are multiple flies. I’ve spotted at least three hanging out on the window together. I’ve also discovered that Q-tips are better than spoons for fishing flies from toilets (less water displacement). I had a double save with both ends of a single Q-tip, and I’m continuously surprised by the flies’ ability to shake it off and get back to doing whatever the hell it is that they do. I don’t know how symbolic this is in terms of fly salvation, since I accidentally washed one fly down the sink and drank another that crash-landed in my water glass.
The point is I’ll probably never look at flies, eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, or breathing in the same way. I was surprised that relatively mild, continuous discomfort can be worse than sudden spasms of pain. I’m also wondering if perpetual unhappiness is the worst form of discomfort. I’m beginning to appreciate how much I haven’t appreciated, so maybe that’s a comfortable start.
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