THE YEAR OF LIVING PENETRATEDLY

This post has enormous TMI potential, but if people can blog about such horrors as blood squirting out of their asses, surely this is not so terrible.

In the span of less than a twelvemonth, all of my Major Orifices were penetrated. Medically, that is.

Roll back the clock. It was August 2002, and when I went under the knife to have my deviated nasal septum un-deviated, little did I realize that that surgery – my first ever – was to be the Opening Shot in a year-long Volley o’ Procedural Fun.

Strange as it seems, my biggest concern as I lay on the operating table was that I would become nauseated from the anesthetic. I had no intentions of spoiling what was then a 31-year No-Puke Streak. As it turned out, that was not a problem.

General anesthesia is strange. You lie on the table while the anesthesiologist injects a bolus of Powerful Soporific into your IV, and the next thing you know, you’re dressed and ready to be wheeled out the door. What the fuuuuuhhhhh… Weird.

Even stranger, as you begin to come out of the druggy haze, you can speak coherent sentences without having a shred of memory of them later. That is a little scary.

But I digress. Nasal septoplasty: Orifice Number One.

Five months later, I found myself once again on the receiving end of a Medical Penetration, this time to retrieve a recalcitrant Kidney-Stone. I was out of town when I discovered the problem (aaarrggghhh), and the hospital in Novi, Michigan that took care of me was kind enough to send me home with pain pills and a strainer. Thanks oh, so much. My urologist would have none of that: she (yes, she) decided to go right in and grab it.

Oy.

That was Orifice Number Two.

Having turned fifty the prior year, it was now time for That Procedure The Old Guys Get, in which a viewing device approximately the size of a firehose is delicately threaded up the old keister. The good news is, my gastroenterologist found no problems (kenahora). Bad news is, the preparation for the procedure is a mite…unpleasant. Ever hear that expression “It went through (whatever) like a dose of salts”? I’m here to tell you that a dose of salts will go right through you, indeed, and it will take everything with it. Meals I hadn’t seen in years. A DeSoto radiator – wait, that was a standing rib roast I ate in 1978.

Orifice Number Three.

The final Bodily Violation came in July 2003, when, after many years of foot-dragging, I finally had my wisdom teeth taken out. Being in no hurry to have any kind of possibly unpleasant Dental Work performed upon me, I was waiting for an intractable problem to show up that would force me to act. It came, finally, in the form of a hairline crack in one of the third molars. I had decided long ago that if I had to have one taken out, I’d have ’em all pulled out at once…and I did.

Thanks to liberal amounts of nitrous oxide and Versed, I had no idea what the process was like. They could’ve stood on my head to pull those damn things out; I would not have cared.

That was Orifice Number Four.

Four major orifices in the span of less than one year. Did they miss anything? Yes, if you count the ears…