I’ve been seeing some doctors recently, trying to get to the bottom of this weird nausea thing. Today’s experience ought to give the folks out there a nice, front row seat to what I’m up against…
So the doctor looks me straight in the eye and says that the next thing to try is a stool sample. For obvious reasons, this kind of freaks me out; I have no idea what it means I have to do. And after some of the stuff that I’ve already done, I’m expecting the worse.
“Oh no!”, she says. “It’s really easy. You go into a basin, and some other poor shlep has to root through it. You see, we’re looking for parasites.” She then hands me a slip of paper and sends me to the lab to “pick up my basin”.
I’m thinking, at this point, how nice things are in Japan with their super toliets that can tell you if you’re alive or not, and for how long. Dead Serious. But then I think to myself, “Man, It can’t be that bad. I mean, we spend billions of dollars on medical research, right? Surely the technology is there to develop the perfect method of collecting a take-home stool sample. I mean hell, for a pet, you just follow them around with a zip-lock bag instead of a pooper-scooper.
So needless to say, I was expecting something similar. And needless to say, I am quite disappointed.
So I get to the lab, and I am greeted by a rather large, evil looking woman with a thick german accent that couldn’t use her inside voice. No, she spoke with her WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST! voice. When she was pleased.
“Great,” I think; “She’ll scream instructions to me that everyone around will hear…”. Not that I’m ashamed; I mean hell. Everyone poops. I think. Maybe this lady doesn’t though; maybe she traded “calls of nature” with satanic voice lessons. Who knows?
So I put my slip of paper (face down) in the little tray, and sit in the waiting area that the lab shares with the pharmacy. And I wait.
About 10 minutes later, she bellows, “Dylan!” and I shot straight up, barely able to restrain the roman salut that was about to follow through. So I meander up to the counter, where she’s busy messing around with some bottles, and a bucket.
“So,” She says, “What I Need you To Do, is take this,” she held up the bucket, “and on the Commode like This, and put this jar here. Bowel move over The Jar, take little spoon, here, into three jars.” She then proceeded to hold up six jars. “Understand?”.
No. No. No, I don’t quite understand, but I would give anything. Anything. Not to hear it again.
“What are the other bottles for?” I asked.
“Well, these –”, she holds up a bag with two jars, a grey one and a pink one, “are one sample. We need three sample. One jar, which one we don’t care. Just One from Each. Just fill to Red Line…” She pointed at a red line, maybe three quarters of the way up the jar. “Bring Us the samples withing Four Hours. After Four Hours, samples go bad, and you have to do them again. You Do Not Want to do it again.”
No. No. No, I don’t.
“Maybe there’s been some mistake,” I suggest, “I needed my eyes drained___”
“Just bring it back Before 4 Hours.”
“So that means tomorrow morning.” I suggest. She shrugged.
“We’re open from 9 to 5. Just 4 hours after you collect the sample.”
She then put everything — the three bags of two jars, the “yellow” jar that my bowel will move over, the bucket, and a Biohazard bag, and puts them in a rather nice, discreet paper bag. Like the kind that you would find at a bookstore; or an art shop. Somehow, I was expected a solid black bag like the kind you get at an Adult bookstore.
So I’ve got the little jars in front of me now. For starters, they’re called “Para-Pak”. Such a cute name! Awww. Secondly, it says, “Harmful!/Don’t Drink”. No, shit. (Pardon the pun). I’m not exactly expecting a drink when I have one of these you know? Thirdly, the pink one says, “Potential Cancer Hazard”. Just what am I pooping into here, anyway? And finally, the “spoon” she was talking about is the smallest little thing I’ve ever seen. If that’s a “spoon”, then I’ll say right now that I need a damn shovel.
At this point, I’m am so tempted to just walk down to the nearest dog-park and collect my samples there. Hah! That would teach them! My doctor would be like:
“Well, you samples look just fine, except that you’ve been eating a lot of wood chips, and you have heart-worm.”
At any rate, everything is all ready to go, at least on my side. My body, however, is saying, Man, are you freaking crazy? The mere thought of going through this has locked my body up so tight that not even the IRS could loosen my sphincter.
So, to cap things off, the only sane conclusion that I can come up with is, Don’t ever go to the doctor for nausea. They, my friends, will top that sick feeling you have in your stomach in ways you never thought possible.