The Perils of Not Dying Young

Let me warn you up front--this post is going to be gross.  Some material may not be suitable for all ages or dispositions.  Reader discretion is advised.  This means you, Mama.

Are you still reading?  Well, then let me tell you a little bit about my butthole.  My asshole is much like my personality: angry and irritated.  Or at least it was a few months ago.  I'd like to share with you the tale of my tail-end because, well, it's kind of funny.  Also, several people have advised me against it, so it must be good.

I'm talking about hemorrhoids, of course.  Another of the many problems I'm having to learn to deal with because I failed to die before now.  It's probably a result of all those times I ate nothing but MREs for a week and only pooped once.  I used to see the constipative effects of the "Meal, Ready to Eat" as a positive thing, a way to delay the inevitable until I was in a location with a good place to shit. (Is constipative a word?  Spellchecker doesn't think so, but I think it is.)


You never think about things like this when watching Game of Thrones, do you? 

Some Marines think they can go through life eating MREs all the time with no ill effects, but sooner or later, you must pay the piper.  And the later it is, the worse it's going to be.  I once went 11 days on a diet of only MREs and this weird sort of pita bread they used to give us.  I don't remember exactly what it was called, but "long shelf life" was written on the wrapper.  They should have written "You will not shit for two weeks if you eat this" on the wrapper instead, because that's the effect it has.  At the same time that I was eating this constipation-maximizing diet, the MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit) I was with was ashore on the island of Sardinia.  We had about 10 port-a-johns to share among about 2000 people, so those things were completely ruined pretty much immediately.  To make matters worse, some dude put an MRE-bomb in one of them, right into the poop-well.  It exploded and absolutely coated the inside of the port-a-john with liquid shit.  I naively walked right up and opened the door, not even wondering why there was no line for this particular shitter.  Big mistake.  So, I consequently gave up all hope of using those things.  We were also expressly forbidden to poop anywhere but the port-a-johns (port-a-shitter in Marine-speak), lest we ruin the delicate ecosystem.  Ordinarily, I don't let rules like that influence my behavior, but Sardinia has precious few trees or even tall brush to hide behind.  I'm a private pooper, as I've said before.  So I just held it.

After the training exercise was over, we all got back on the ship, where there was plenty of fresh fruit and coffee.  I had  a belly full of both, smoked a cigarette, and then it was time to see a man about a horse, so to speak.

Click this link to set the scene: Randy Takes a Crap

It was horrifying.  I would have sworn that they had been hiding broken bricks and shards of glass in that extend shelf life bread.  That crap was taken in 2001, over twelve years ago, but I still remember it.  That's how bad it was.

But I digress.  The point is that over the years, things had gotten out of sorts in my nether regions.  My butthole was angry, and wasn't coming around.  I tried every home remedy the Internet had to offer, to no avail.  I kept winding up on websites about various terrible diseases.  I really didn't want to go to the doctor, though.  I didn't want to have to show my brown starfish to some stranger.  But the Internet was being very scary, and I really didn't want to die of butt cancer.  That's what took Vince Lombardi out, you know.

I'll bet his turd cutter was much tougher than mine,
and look what happened to him.

I told you all of that to tell you this story...
I finally had enough of my ass hurting, and decided to go to medical to get it looked at.  While I'm stationed here in Quantico, I use the medical facility at Officer Candidate's School (OCS), which as far as Navy medicine goes, is pretty good.  They do tend to have a lot of very junior people working in there, however.  And so it came to pass that after I checked in to sick call, I found myself in an examination room with a 19 year old young woman describing my anus.  To her credit, she didn't so much as crack a smile.



This young Navy Corpsman took my blood pressure, asked me if I had any allergies, all of the usual jazz, and then she left me alone to go get the doctor.  After a good long while, she returned with another young woman, this one a lieutenant, junior grade (LTJG) medical officer.  For those of you unfamiliar with the sea services, a LTJG is an O-2 in the Navy, one step up from an ensign, the lowest officer rank.  It is also the rank immediately conveyed on a medical officer upon graduation from school.  She couldn't have been more than about 26 or so, and looked younger--a brand new graduate of the Navy's medical program, in the Navy for only a year or so total.  And so, now I was discussing the in and outs of my sphincter with TWO very young, fresh-faced ladies.  Everybody was so serious, too.  It was hilariously awkward, like a sit-com come to life.

I need to lay off the Mexican food for a while...

This female version of  Doogie Houser, M.D. asked me if I had hemorrhoids, or anal fissures, or what.  I told her that I had no idea, since I find seeing my own asshole challenging, even with a mirror.  She told me that if I had fissures, I would know because it would hurt like hell.  I told her that I wasn't in that exam room because I felt a tickling sensation.  My butthole was hurting, bleeding, and inflamed.  And itchy! I had been scooting around on my rear-end like a dog on the carpet for months.  Besides, shouldn't she be the one to make the diagnosis?  She's the one who went to medical school, after all.  Wasn't there a class on anuses?  (Is anuses the plural of anus?  I'll have to look that up later...)

Anus Class in medical school

She asked me a battery of additional asshole-related questions, and then she asked if I would like her to just prescribe some medications--that maybe we didn't need to do an examination.  She obviously did NOT want to do the exam.  There was no way on earth I was about to let her off the hook that easily, though.  No, Doc.  It's time to EARN that medical school scholarship.  I told her that I had waited a really long time to come in, and there was no way I was going to turn back now after all of the embarrassment of spending a half-hour describing my "problem area" to them.  Nope, she was going to look at my butt, and that was that.  I did ask that she refrain from sticking a finger up there, since that seems to be what they teach doctors to do whenever they see a human anus.  She assured me that it wouldn't be necessary.

They (the young enlisted girl was still there for some unknown reason) then pulled a curtain around the exam table and told me to remove my trousers, and they stepped over to the door to wait.  Once I was disrobed, they pulled the curtain back, and both came back in.  I didn't get that.  What's the point of the curtain if you are just going to come in once I'm naked?  And why was the corpsman still there?  It appeared to be only curiosity, as she didn't really do anything the whole time.  Maybe they thought it would be more humiliating if they had more people in the room.

So anyway, we finally get down to business.  The doctor puts on her rubber gloves and looks at my butt for about 3 seconds.  Then she tells me that I have one "tiny" hemorrhoid at about the six o'clock position.  I'm not joking about that, she called my horribly painful hemorrhoid tiny.  I was sort of upset by that.  Made me feel like a wimp.  I went in there that morning assuming that I was going to have to have surgery or something.  Also, I'm a little hazy about the 6 o'clock reference, as if it was an enemy fighter plane or something.

My butthole hurts

After I pulled up my pants, the young LTJG wrote me out a prescription for some hydrocortisone cream and some suppositories.  Everybody was really uncomfortable and awkward (they had both just peered into my nether-regions, afterall), so I struck up a conversation to ease the tension. I asked each of them how long they had been in the Navy.  We discussed the LTJG's path through medical school and how my son wants to go to medical school.  She told me all about the program she attended med school on.  I also talked to the young corpsman about her experiences so far in the Navy.  But we all knew it would never be right between us.  They knew too much.

After enduring the Navy's blessedly impersonal automated pharmacy, I took my new medicine home and applied it right away.  I don't know if you have ever tried to use a suppository before, but it's no small feat.  My rear end is unfamiliar with the idea of it being used as anything other than an exit.  I must have gone through about four of those things before I got one to stay in there.  I kept putting one in, waiting a few seconds, and then the instant I moved my finger, firing it out of there like a bullet.  They would ricochet off the side of the toilet and make a pinging sound, no kidding.  Eventually, however, I was successful, and the medicine worked like a charm.  

Zing!

So, the moral of this story is to just go to the doctor.  It won't be as bad as you think it will, and they might be able to do something to help you.  After years of having them just give me a Motrin and tell me to drink more water, they finally came through with some good stuff.  Now I have a butthole like a 10 year old boy.  A Protestant boy, not a Catholic one, of course.  Thank you, Navy Medicine.