Oct
07

Bottoms Up.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may know, I visited a gastroenterologist last week. Aside from the humiliation of discussing my bowel movements with an attractive young man possessing NO appreciation for my command of the euphemism (“Could you be more specific?”) the appointment was fine. After the appointment, however, things took a turn for the worse.

A lab technician drew my blood, and then she informed me that I would need to provide a stool sample. Not right then, thankfully. I would produce and collect the sample at home, and then drop it off during business hours, as one does.

Now, look. I know this isn’t a particularly pleasant topic, but I am told that the only way to deal with trauma is to openly discuss it with others until the details lose their power to horrify. I am trying to heal, here, so you will just have to bear with me.

“You’ve collected stool before?” the technician said. It wasn’t really a question, and I took offense. Do I LOOK like the kind of girl who goes around collecting stool? Is this the impression I give, that of a frequent stool collector?
I answered icily that I had not, and then, to my horror, she produced a large bag full of collection supplies. I had assumed that there would be only a cup involved, but no! I would be collecting FIVE DIFFERENT SAMPLES.

“This goes on your toilet,” said the technician, revealing a large plastic hat into which I would be relieving myself. One of the samples was a swab, a large q-tip I was to run over my own excrement before retuning it to a sterile tube. Another two samples contained liquid to which I was to add precise amounts of…you know. And another two were cups that each needed to be “at least half full.” Depending upon your outlook, you could also say they could be nearly half empty.

The gastroenterologist is located only a mile from my husband’s office, a good twenty minutes from our home. It would have made no sense for me to drive out of my way to return the samples, so when Scott returned from work, I met him at the door with a request:
“I know this wasn’t specifically covered in our marriage vows,” I said, “but I need you to be my poo courier.”

I will draw a veil over what precisely ensued later that evening in my bathroom laboratory, except to say that I did my best, and I will never be the same again. I ran out of material before I got to the last jar, but I didn’t care. I left it empty. I decided I’d rather die of whatever disorder it was meant to test for than spend another moment with a fecal scoop.

Afterwards I washed my hands over and over again. I’d never actually touched anything pertinent, but still they felt dirty, and I kept leaping up to scrub them one last time.
“They don’t feel clean!” I whined, “I’m like Lady Macbeth, with feces!”
Scott explained that this simply made good evolutionary sense.
“If you weren’t disgusted by it you might eat it,” he explained, “and then you’d get sick and die.”

Thank you, Evolution. MESSAGE RECEIVED.

I don’t even want to talk about the fact that one of the samples had to be refrigerated. In fact, I never, ever want to speak of this again. It is a mark of my desperation that I willingly sought out a gastroenterologist—a specialty KNOWN to be overly eager to examine things that, unlike life, are best left un. To his credit, he is the first doctor who has displayed any interest in getting to the bottom of my symptoms, even if he took the bottom part rather too literally. His opinion was that I likely had celiac disease, a conclusion I’d begun to fear some time ago but had been fighting ever since, desperate to avoid a diagnosis that comes with a prohibition against pasta and tuna melts.

But my tests came back today, and I do not have celiac. Everything was fine, with the exception of a barely elevated CRP. The gastroenterologist offered an endoscopy and colonoscopy, but that seems excessive, even to me. I have some vague theories based on my positive clotting antibodies, the CRP, and my TSH being high (for me–2.5), but I’m not a doctor, I just play one late at night on search engines. I see an endocrinologist tomorrow, and then I am going to stop driving to far flung suburbs to be told that there are only small, nonspecific things the matter with me. I will conclude that this is simply my new normal. Markedly inferior to my old normal, but then so are my new breasts, memory, and skin elasticity. C’est la vie.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |