Wouldn't you know it. Joanie -- my wife's nanny during her childhood -- had decided to visit us. And barely had she settled in with us when pop went the weasel -- just as dinner was served, appendicitis struck the old bat. She was gnawing on a giant ear of corn with her porcelain chompers yapping back and forth as she tried to talk at the same time. "...so, anyways, the flight down was good but the ham sandwich tasted like a petrified monkey gallbladder..." Yada, yada, yada.
I'd never met the old bat, but I took an instant disliking to her after I'd greeted her at the Delta off-ramp at the Cincinnati airport. I was told to look for a six-foot woman wearing a yellow pantsuit. She wasn't hard to spot, looking like a Sasquatch-meets-Rosie O'Donnell cloning experiment gone bad. In the car she ripped a few flaming farts that smelled like a burning turtle shell, and I really started to worry. The old bat was supposed to stay for five long days, and already I couldn't get the burning fart smell out of my nose hairs.
Cut back to the ear of corn. Without warning, she slopped it down on her plate and announced, "There's something wrong with my tummy." No kidding, Sherlock: what's wrong with your tummy is that it is attached to the rest of you.
My wife insisted on calling 911 (which I was thankful for -- I didn't want the old bat back in my Buick), and off they took her to the hospital. I tried to stay home, but my wife insisted we follow in the Buick. Sure enough, the old bat's appendix was burst wide open. Suddenly I was thankful for that ham sandwich. I was in the clear. Five days in the hospital and back we'd send her to New Jersey.
So I thought. Surgery and back to our place only a couple days later. My wife insisted on giving her our bed, and suddenly I was sleeping on the couch in my own house and Sasquatch was squatting on my bed. For the next nine days, to be exact.
You are wondering where poop fits into this story; and here it is. My wife and I are very young and very poor and paying off college loans, and thus we live in a barely three-room apartment. With thin walls. The old bat commandeered the toilet and hunkered down as if she was trying to blast it to China. It sounded like somebody was trying to shove a tibia bone into an industrial garbage disposer. Of course, she wasn't allowed to dump alone, so someone had to stand there holding her lifeless carcass on Thomas Crapper. The odor was so offensive that even my wife's dog refused to go near the bathroom -- he used to drink out of the toilet, but he's been cured of that habit. She pretended to pass out a few times and had to be dragged back into bed. I refused to wipe her.
The bed was loaded with Depends, appendix juice, underwear, and applesauce. When the old bat finally got back on that plane, we threw out the bed and went into debt buying a new one.