My 21-year-old daughter has recently moved back in with us while in between jobs and apartments, so once again we are bonding as only a mother and daughter can, including detailed discussions of bowels habits and problems. We also have only one bathroom in this tiny house, so even if we didn’t talk about poop, we’d hear about it (or smell it).
One afternoon she and I were browsing the internet on our respective computers when she told me she had these unusual abdominal pains - very sharp - and that they had started about an hour ago. She often gets pains related to her reproductive system so I didn’t think much about it. The pain got worse and worse, so she went into the bathroom to take a shower and try to poop. Within minutes the pain increased; and because she said she felt constipated I suggested an enema. She refused to ‘assume the position’ and was eventually screaming hysterically from the pains she was having. To complicate matters, when she is in pain she doesn’t breathe properly, can’t think rationally and tends to pass out. And so there she ended, butt nekkid on the toilet, clammy and sweating, and begging me to come in and keep her from falling on the floor.
In the meanwhile I had been researching abdominal pains on the internet, and hers were suspiciously similar to an ectopic pregnancy - where a fallopian tube is ready to or has ruptured. She had just about passed out on the toilet, so she asked me to carry her into the bedroom. She expressed that she couldn’t walk or feel her extremities, and that she was internally bleeding. Because of her size (she’s only 5’ and about 100 pounds) I felt I could manage it.
She yelled for me to call 911 so I did, thinking her reproductive organs were in jeopardy. I then had to find some clothes in which to dress her so she would be partially covered. The last time the paramedics came due to a severe migraine seizure on her part, she was about to get in the shower; this would have been her second nearly-nude paramedic experience had my motherly instincts not rang true.
The ambulance came along with FIVE paramedics and she was loaded onto a stretcher and taken to the hospital in her Spongebob boxers and a t-shirt (the closest things handy).
I then called her boyfriend and left a message that she was on her way to the hospital and in mortal peril.
I followed in my car. When I got to the emergency room, I wasn’t immediately allowed to be with her because she’s 21. After about 15 minutes I went in and found her on a bed with a blood pressure cuff and finger pulse monitor attached. The first thing she said when I walked in was “Get this stuff off me. I seriously have to take a shit.” I told her she had been trying to take a shit for an hour now and it wasn’t going to happen, and that if I took off the equipment an alarm would go off. She sat up, ripped off the cuff and the monitor, and raced into the adjacent bathroom. After a few minutes she said “Mom! You need to come in here and see this.” Holy shit.
"Did that come out of YOU?”
It was the biggest turd I had seen in all my 47 years. It had to be a foot long with the circumference of a summer sausage. I said “Well, now you have a preview of what childbirth will be like. If you can give birth to THAT without pain medication, it will be smooth sailing.”
We weren’t sure if we should flush it or if the nurse would need to see it, so we temporarily left it floating in all its glory. Meanwhile, she called her boyfriend from her cell phone to assure him that she was not dead or dying, but she could not bring herself to tell him exactly what had sent her to the ER. She handed the phone to me, and I told him that she had given birth to a brown baby boy. There was a moment of silence, and then he said “She needed to be taken by ambulance to the ER to take a dump?”
The nurse came back in and we told her about the ‘baby’. The nurse declined to take a look, and that was it. My daughter had to lay there for an hour and take some IV fluids since she was dehydrated; and then it was back home, with her wearing MY coat over the Spongebob boxers since I had forgotten to grab her any clothes or a coat.
She said she got some interesting looks standing in the discharge lobby, wearing my plus size coat over her tiny, bare-legged, barefoot frame in the dead of winter.
She has no job, so no medical insurance; and we both should have been deeply depressed about the expense this incurred. And yet we could not stop laughing.
We call it the $3,000 turd because the bills will probably be about that much.
If she had just taken the $1.99 Fleet Enema I’d offered, none of this would have been necessary, but that’s how she is – an irrational hypochondriac. Hopefully an important life lesson for her has been learned here.
