Holy Shit

Last Tuesday was the best of days and the worst of days. Things got off to a great start with a sizable bowel movement, but just before I had to take my wife to an appointment, I noticed that blood had been in my stool. I quickly headed to the internet and found that it could be a number of things: an anal fissure, hemorroids, colon cancer.

I told my wife about it as we drove to her appointment. She said to keep an eye on it, that she hoped it wasn't colon cancer (a first cousin of mine who is in his early 30's was diagnosed with that a few years ago). My love is no stranger to stool blood herself as she has GERD. I passed my time at the library while she was being seen. Curiousity got the better of me while there, so I headed to the cancer section and found a book about the colon variety of it. Standing there, reading the symptoms, I started to get a bit woozy; I once fainted in science class when a teacher was giving a detailed description of something (You can read it about here).

I realized that I best sit down for a while, so headed over to a seat and slumped down a bit. I then looked into checking out some books that wouldn't make me lightheaded. One was Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. It's about the beginnings of a distinctly American religion, Mormonisn.



It's interesting how Joseph Smith, the religion's founder, proposed that we all could receive revelations from God. However, he came to realize that this might not be a good thing as what happens when his revelations differed from others? What if mine says that he's a charlatan? He had to change things up a bit because of this. And that, my friends, is the main problem with religion. You are to trust in someone else's revelations over your own. If your experience is different than church leadership's, yours must be thrown out.

But back to my experience last Tuesday. As I sat in the car, waiting for my wife to finish up, I thought that maybe this blood would end up being the death of me, that I wouldn't be able to take care of my Pomeranian for the rest of her life, that I might have to leave this mortal coil before Sarah Palin gains even more power than she already has. Should I have gotten checked out earlier for cancer as my mom had once suggested?

That evening at work, I wondered if my next BM would be red. Interestingly, thinking this really kept me in the moment, really made me concentrate on what I was doing just then. I wasn't concerned about getting my taxes done or going on vacation this summer. I was just concentrating on the next day or two, the next time I dropped some friends off at the pool.

Later that week, I did make a shit. There was no sign of red and hasn't been since. It would seem that the monster I passed led to a bit of a fissure that did no lasting damage. Nonetheless, I look forward to having my first colonoscopy in the near future. The age of 40 looms and will come to me in the penultimate month of this year.