We're all familiar with the party line. You get your tonsils taken out when you're a kid, which means you get to stay home from school and your mom gives you tons of ice cream to soothe the pain. Yes, it hurts for a while; but you're young, and it's cool. At least, all your friends think so -- maybe even when it happens to them. So what happens when, for reasons you cannot even recall anymore, you miss out on the tonsillectomy until you are well into middle-age, whereupon you have also acquired a deviated septum, severe snoring and sleeping problems, and, furthermore, are often driving around a five-state sales territory in this unhealthy condition?

What happens is this: you eventually get tired of all the tiredness and bite the bullet, telling your sympathetic friends and family, scheduling the surgeries and hoping for the best, but not imagining that you will go exactly one week between BMs for the first time ever in your distinguished dumping career. But being the professional PoopReporter that you are, you keep track of it day by day and work it into the following report.

I did not enter this one-week period of apocalyptic anal retention without trepidation and some sense of what I would be missing. A sympathetic cohort took me out to dinner last Wednesday at a gourmet restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, during a convention. "Celebrate the good times," said my friend, George. "You ain't gonna be eatin' so good for a little while to come." I wholeheartedly accepted George's pronouncement and ordered pan-seared black grouper, asparagus, new potatoes, Italian bread dipped in olive oil, and even splurged on a little fruit sorbet for dessert. By the following evening, I had disposed of my upscale menu choices in my usual exemplary excretory fashion -- long, dark, and snaky.

Then came the surgery last Friday: four different procedures related to sinuses, throat, nose, etc.; all fairly routine, all outpatient, and all hell-bound and determined to make a lasting impression on me. It was difficult to swallow anything afterwards -- even soft foods like pudding, applesauce, and yogurt. Rehydrating is essential during these periods, so my sister-in-law kept pushing Gatorade and other liquids on me, but even that wasn't a snap. Everything that went down had to be timed to correspond with the windows of relief the pain meds were producing.

The immediate post-op weekend crept along with the same menu (or lack of it). I had now gone three days without any real solid food -- and, accordingly, nothing to show for it at the other end. But I wanted at all costs to avoid a repeat of the manual disimpaction episode I suffered last summer after a minor procedure to remove a benign cyst; so, as a precautionary measure, I took one Dulcolax Stool Softener tablet during that period of eternal applesauce, yogurt, pudding, and Gatorade.

By the fifth day I realized that I had set a personal best. I had never gone this long in my life without a BM of any kind; furthermore, I still had no urge to break my streak. I had eaten so precious little that having any sort of BM would have defied nature, resembling had it occurred perhaps long-forgotten outtakes from The Exorcist. Yesterday, on the sixth day -- I don't mean to sound Biblical here; that's just the way it all went down! -- I finally got up the courage to put the pain meds in their place, open a package of tuna, flake it firmly with a fork, and eat some honest-to-goodness animal protein for the first time in nearly a week. I kept it down and with it returned my flickering memories of what it was like to pull my pants down, take a potty, and wipe myself just like all the big kids got to do.

Today, the Seventh Day, I did not rest, instead rediscovering my inner child, sitting on the pot one week after tonsillectomy surgery. And boy was I surprised at his conduct! That one Dulcolax had done the trick, and when my urge finally reared its little head like a lost child in a game of hide-and-seek, it did so without begrudging me an inch. This inner child of mine was so full of pent-up energy, in fact, that he was downright explosive, all things considered -- starting out with machine-gun precision, he proceeded to layer the bowl with something resembling more than anything else chewed-up tobacco. Burnt umber -- if my Big Box Of Crayolas' memory serves Ð or maybe a bit darker brown than that, and in texture almost as flaky and formless as the foods that had made it.

Then I remembered that I had been force-feeding this peckish child a course of antibiotics which, in this case, consisted of a pink, bubble-gum-tasting solution that was clearly designed by doctors and pharmacists to impress the average five-year-old having his or her tonsils out. It didn't do too much for my middle-aged outlook, even though I suspect that my inner child was looking down into the bowl, eyes wide with wonder and comic-book exclamations about to escape his lips at the sight of the mess below.

There was more there than met the eye. That soft-serve, post-op bowel blast from Hell backed up on me and nearly overflowed, catching my eye at the last second and compelling me to work in the plunger at the redeeming moment. It's a good thing, too, because this inner child doesn't do windows or tiled floors.

I figure the worst is now behind me. I was able to down some scrambled eggs this morning. Soon I hope to graduate to veggies and fish, my favorites, and get back into my cherished pooping routines. Lest I forget to mention, a sidenote: I was able to fart quite loudly and impressively on a regular basis throughout the week, which demonstrates that the inner child always has the gas ring fired up and ready to go, even when the rest of the lab equipment is out of commission.

-- The Big Wiper