WARNING : Very detailed poop talk will follow.
So there I was, lying on my back in bed last night, playing games on my tablet, when I felt something… move… in and near my butthole.
Uh oh, I thought, not unreasonably.
Steeling my nerves, I put my hand in the affected region and sure enough, some “stuff” had come out of me, which I quickly cleaned up with some Kleenex.
I lay back, naturally somewhat upset, and pondered a bit, then with a sickening lurch of the stomach, it suddenly occurred to me to check the area under where my butt had been to see if I had more “stuff” to clean up.
Ayup. There was a whole pile of it there. More Kleenex based kleen clean up was needed and it was needed STAT.
OK folks, here’s where things get clinically fecal.
You might be wondering why I keep calling it “stuff” and not shit. Patient readers know that I am not normally even remotely inclined towards euphemism.
Well I call it “stuff” because this was not feces as we know it.
It was very dark in color, for one. Not quite black (thank God) but a dark enough color that it would look black in poor lighting conditions.
It was also very dense, and (brace yourselves) gritty.
It was definitely poop-like. Poop-adjacent, even. But too different from your average human defecation to really consider it shit.
Whatever the hell it was, I sure as hell didn’t want it coming out of me involuntarily. And this time while I was wide awake, and that’s definitely an escalation.
And afterward I had this weirdly dilated feeling. Like my butthole was wide open and anything, including a decent sized chihuahua, could come sliding out of it.
I did not like that feeling. It made me very paranoid about this bout of incontinence becoming permanent. Maybe my O-ring had been jammed open for good.
Thankfully, that does not seem to be the case. Phew.
My best theory as to what exactly came out of me is that, like with other fecal incidents, it was the product of incomplete digestion.
That would track with the fact that, ever since I got started on the antibiotics in the hospital, I have not passed any solid stools.
It’s been nothing but Hershey squirts for almost a week.
Which is not a huge deal in and of itself. It’s something that I have to pay very close attention to as both an IBS sufferer and someone who knows how rapidly diarrhea can deplete your hydration and electrolytes, but still, not a big deal by itself.
When I mentioned it to Doc Costin yesterday, he said it was probably a product of the antibiotics killing all my gut flora, and I was like, duh, right.
The incontinence, however, is more worrisome. As patient readers know, I was told that I needed to come back to the hospital if I ever found myself unable to pee or losing control of my bowels.
Well I am peeing well enough, but…. this….. is not good.
I have amended the rule to “go back to the hospital if it happens more than once in a very great while”, largely because I don’t want to have to go to the ER and tell intake and triage that I pooped myself unless it is absolutely necessary.
And so far, so good. No repeat incidents. Hopefully it will stay that way and I won’t have to spend ANOTHER weekend in the god damned ER.;
More after the break.
What I want
Challenge level : things I might actually be able to get.
Might as well start with the big one : I want a job writing for television. The very notion of something I write being turned into an actual TV show, with actors and cameras and lighting and everything, thrills me and fills me with wonder and awe.
Hell, just the idea of employment seems impossibly magical to me. The idea of having something productive to do with my day (beside write these golden words for you, dear reader) and actually getting paid to do it on a regular basis blows my mine.
I’ve spent a very long time thinking I was less than worthless.
Being able to assign any monetary value to my existence and my efforts would go a long way to repairing that.
And the thing is. this desire is doable. I know how to go about pursuing it. I could beat the rushes for TV writing job postings. I could enter every TV writing contest I can find. I could try to use my connection with the few teachers from VFS who liked me to “network” and make contacts within the biz.
I know how to go about it. But I lack the courage and motivation to do it. It takes a lot of both of those to just keep campaigning for oneself until you get what you want.
And I feel far too small and weak and frail to do it.
Which brings me to another thing I want : an agent.
Agents exist because a hell of a lot of us writers are shy and introverted and therefore not exactly well suited for the job of self-promotion.
Me, I can get into a mode where I can really sell myself for a given job or task, but that takes a lot out of me and I could not possibly sustain it for a long campaign.
But when looking for an agent, I really only have to sell myself to them. Then they can sell me (so to speak) to interested parties.
Unfortunately, there’s only like thirty agents in all of Canada, so competition for representation is fierce.
However, I have something the competition does not : I am almost preternaturally talented. I write words good, and I can do it both fast and well.
So I at least stand a chance of landing an agent. From what I have read, it seems they are mostly looking for book queries, and I have written a bunch of books but none of them are exactly the sort of thing that gets read aloud on the CBC.
So maybe I should write The Great Prince Edward Island Novel, about fishing and farming and life on the beach. About the constant humiliation of tarting your culture up to appeal to tourists, and the grinding humiliation of long term unemployment and what it does to the souls of young men, and what it’s like to grow up someplace so sad and slow and quiet in a province that is barely even a joke to the rest of the country.
Hmmm. I actually have quite a lot to say on the subject of my homeland.
Maybe I really should write this damned thing.
I’ll have to have a good think about it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.