A story of bladders, pee, and an errant strawberry

Last week, I had surgery on my innards! Most specifically on an organ that I shall call my blah-dére. Which had gone askew, drifted free of its moorings, and was eventually (maybe when I hit the age of 90) going to lead me into the Depends aisle if the doctor didn’t fix it. Three eight-pound babies sitting atop it might have caused it to slip from its accustomed position and go on a strange peregrination, saying hello to the colon and sidling up to the spleen. (The blah-dére is a known sidler, and should be given Tic-Tacs to carry.) It was on its way somewhere. It needed to be harnessed.

Organs that wander need stern discipline. I was embarrassed about this business, because blah-déres ain't the stuff of polite society, but now I'm posting it on my blog. Go figure. (People would rather talk about butts or boobs or even colons.)  But suppose your heart wandered, or your duodenum? Or your liver just up and hid somewhere in the cavity of your chest, cringing from your nightly devotionals to the Lords of Booze? You wouldn't put up with it, not for a minute.

I was not interested in shopping for “Poise” brand products (although I hear they make a fine and worthy product). Neither should you be, one in three like me! Go to the hospital and get that sonofabitch hoisted back on deck like a drunken sailor. Ashamed? Pfah! It’s more embarrassing to tinkle while doing jumping jacks or while doing ballet leaps to “Moves Like Jagger.” I’m going to become one of those “hot trampoline girls” now. Not a droplet of pee shall 'scape my nethers. I'm going to drink lots and lots of iced tea and beer and then go on the trampoline. 

I share this hideously embarrassing story so that others may seek the same path as I have. Because I'm cool like that. Although Whoopi, the spokeswoman for Poise, is very righteous for speaking about her "spritz" in a public forum, I don't like the thought of her wearing a "pad." I can't even say "pad" without using quote marks because it's such a horrible word, rather like "panty." Do we like "pads" for our periods? The last time I wore a blasted "pad" was after birthing my third child, and it was like wearing a couch cushion between my legs. No grown woman ought to submit to this injustice! (There is a school of thought, by the way, that suggests that wearing diapers is insulting and wrongful for babies. No baby ought to submit to this injustice!)

Blah-dére surgery is covered by insurance, although you will need to check with your own health care provider.

Whilst in hospital, I had the delight of sharing my room with an 87-year-old Italian lady named Philomena. She’d had surgery on her back that morning. As I was eating my “clear” dinner of chicken broth and lime jello (my second such miserable meal of the day), I could smell her dinner of chicken breast with gravy and mashed potatoes from the other side of the curtain.

“I no eat!” said Philomena. Those were about her only words of English.

As soon as her extended family left the premises, she began moaning and groaning like the star of a tragic opera.

“Oh, mamma mia! Lo sono nel dolore terribile!” she cried. I could hear her writhing about, chewing on the scenery a bit for good measure. "Come ho fatto a finire que? Non mi piace questo posto!"

Then she started to gawp up great gobs of phlegm and then swallow ‘em down again. She did this all evening long. It sounded something like this:

“Schllurfkgkgkk…gulp. SHNMMJKKlllffp…gulp.”

After each series of wrenching, barftastic noises, she started to call out for me.

“Miss. Missuz! Missiz! Heeeeelp me! Heeeelp me! Aiuto!”

I could tell the poor old dear was in pain so I’d ring the nurse on her behalf. The nurse would come running in with a Percocet for me.

“No, not me! Her!”

“But we can’t understand a word of Italian!” said all the nurses.

“Um, I think she is in PAIN. Show her the sad-face pain chart,” I suggested.

They rolled old Philomena around on the bed and asked her lots of questions and she babbled at them in Italian. I think they may have given her a Tylenol, but nothing stronger—for she never went to sleep!

After the third incident I accepted the Percocet for myself, and drifted off into a blissful slumber. An hour or so passed, and then:

“Miss! Missuz! Oh, Missuz! Heeeeeelp me! Snlurklegurklrsmskfkg….gulp.”

I rang the nurse and told her I needed another Percocet. She asked where the pain was.

“In my head!” I said.

Finally, morning came. Philomena was moaning and thrashing about in a frenzy. I called the nurse again.

“You gotta help this lady!” I said.

Finally, they gave her a Percocet while she was in the midst of poking at her breakfast, which included a fruit salad.

It wasn’t long before she zonked out, and I was finally able to read my book without disruption. But soon, Philomena’s daughter showed up.

“Mamma!” she said. “Mamma! Wake up! Open your eyes, Mamma! What’s a-wrong with you, Mamma? Mamma!”

The daughter started slapping and tugging at the mother, and crying out for the nurses. Oh Lord, I thought, what if the old lady corked off?

Then the daughter screamed: “Oh Mamma mia! She got a strawberry inside her mouth! She’s a-gonna choke! You kill-a my mamma!”

There was much activity to remove the strawberry while the daughter wailed things like, “You drug-a my mother! You drug-a her and feed her strawberry! Questo e molto male!”

The strawberry was finally extracted and Philomena gave a gentle snort of pleasure, lost in her Percocet-induced dream. I wondered what she’d been like in her youth, and decided that she probably screamed and carried on just as wildly when, as a girl, a boy dropped a newt down her shirt. No, she’d lost none of her spunk. Hopefully not any of her spritz, either. Bring out a trampoline for Philomena, for she wishes to bounce as high as the darkening sky.

Wandering the Halls in a Stained Nightie

In my usual spirit of telling stories creepy enough to curdle the fur on a poodle, I was reminded today of my last experience with birthing a child. It's a little story I like to call "Wandering the Halls in a Stained Nightie Looking for My Baby." (Soon to be released on Lifetime Movie Network.)

The place: Lawrence Hospital, Bronxville, NY. The story of the actual birth event is not so exciting. Everything went grandly. So grandly, in fact, that I recall slurring in a drug-induced stupor, "The baby is crowning? Reeeeeaally?" Now that's a good birth experience. When the baby (soon to become My German Changeling Child) was handed to me, I did have this ominous thought about his looks: "Well, we'll love him anyway." But the little mite is now 2 1/2 and really terribly cute, despite his propensity to gnaw the noses off stuffed animals and speak in a guttural German accent. So if your newborn baby is ugly don't despair.

It was after the birth that things started to go downhill. I was moved to a shared room with a nitwit who had just given birth to a 5 1/2-pound nubbin named Johnny. Although hospital policy prohibited more than a few visitors at a time, this woman had people come in tour buses to troop through her room. They came in batches of 10-15 people at a time, with all their kids in tow, to ooh and ahh over wretched little Johnny in his bassinet.

When the loutish kids walked in they all tracked mud through my side of the room, despite the flimsy "privacy curtain." They dropped candy wrappers and got in mock fights over my bed while I tried to get the baby to latch on. Some of them opened the drawers and rooted through them (looking for free used blankies or nighties?), or took the rubber gloves from the box on the wall and snapped them at each other like slingshots. Some of the commentary from their awful parents went like this:

"He's a precious, poifect angel!"
"What a dawwwllbaby!"
"Bet you can't wait to have a Corona, honey!"

A frickin' Corona? How about a double dirty martini with three olives, stirred please?

Little Miss Twatlet was not nursing, so she fell blissfully asleep while the nurses took Johnny away to feed him bottles all night long. I sat there awake all night long and struggled to nurse my own baby; it was not going well. When the nurse arrived I asked plaintively, "Is there a lactation consultant on staff?"

"A what?" she wondered.

"A lactation consultant. Someone who can help you with problems nursing."

"Um, channel 5 on TV," she mumbled."Everything you need on TV."

The TV channel showed some dowdy, fat-breasted women blissfully nursing their infants with no troubles at all. No one else could help. I struggled on mightily, only feeling happiness when the girl next door awoke in the night groaning in pain.

"I towaah [translation: tore]...I towaah!" she hissed to the nurse. "When the baby came out I towaah down theeeaah. It hoits!" Apparently, her 5 1/2-pound lumplet of a baby had shot out so fast, right through the air into the doctor's arms, that he tore her stem to stern, as they say. Hehhehe.

She whimpered like that for the next day or so. Meanwhile, I was suffering even more. At about 4 am I rang for the nurse and asked her to take the baby away for one hour so I could rest.

"Give him bottle?" she said sweetly.

I knew this was a bad idea, but I was desperate. "Yes, just one bottle! And then bring him right back!"

I woke up about 4 hours later and asked for the baby. No one knew where he was. "Find him!" I said, but no one could seem to track him down. He was either with the doctor, or being weighed, or being fed another bottle. "No...no more bottles!" I cried, but the nurses stared at me blankly. After more time had passed, I determined to find him myself. I dug around in the drawers but the Twatlet's evil visitors had stolen all the clean gowns. So in my still-bloodied gown I got up and shuffled down fluorescent hallways, seeking my baby. "Where's my baby!" I shrieked to the nurses. No one knew.

I peeked into the nursery, which had its shades drawn so I couldn't see any babies at all. Finally someone stopped me and asked me what I was doing wandering about. I was escorted back to my room and told to wait and the baby would arrive within seconds. At least an hour or two later, he was finally returned, fat on formula and good as new. I, however, was ready to kill 'em all, especially the Twatlet, who had just received a fresh tour bus of visitors who trooped past my bed, paused, and stared at me as I resumed my painful and humiliating attempts to nurse the baby. Yes, some of them just stood there and stared. I got on the phone with a friend: "My room is filled with ASSHOLES," I said, loudly enough for them to hear. Pretty soon everybody left in a hurry.

When my own 21-month old visited with his daddy, we encouraged him to scream his loudest...for any reason at all. "Go ahead, let it ALL out," we said wickedly, as he howled like mad, and little Lumplet Johnny woke from his slumbers with a piercing cry.

Baby Three is due for release on or around May 10, 2008. The very day that someone will be mixing that ice-cold martini for me. You might as well make the second one while you're at it.