Mom, bless her soul, has had just about everything go wrong with her body that can go wrong. She seemed fine, except for colds and the like, for years, until my junior year of high school. Then she had a brain aneurysm rupture and nearly kill her; and only experimental treatment kept her alive for three years before the aneurysm could be clipped. High blood pressure was the diagnosis.
Three weeks after being told her aneurysm was no longer a problem and that she was in perfect health, she was rushed to the hospital and found to have Type II diabetes. Later that same year she went for her first gynecological exam in years and in short order there was a breast cancer scare, an ovarian cancer scare, and a cervical cancer scare -- all in one month. Luckily, all turned out to be benign.
One morning in 2003, my dad went in her bedroom to wake her up and smelled something horrible. Thinking maybe Mom had a cold and hadn't noticed she was a little ripe, he helped her to the bathroom so she could bathe (she has balance problems because of the brain surgery and needs a little help). When he saw a massive rotting sore on her side and breast, he took her to the hospital, where it was found that she had necrotizing fasciitis -- better known as flesh eating bacteria. Necrotizing fasciitis is basically a nasty, uncontrolled infection that literally rots the skin off you from the inside out and spreads throughout your body, shutting down everything in its path. There was a big scare about it here in the US not too long ago when cases started popping up everywhere.
Nerve damage from the diabetes kept her from feeling the sore, which could only have been there maybe three days maximum. Of course, her depressed immune system couldn't stop the infection. My mom's a little large, and the wound was in a place where it's hard for one to see for one's self, so she didn't even know it was there. If Dad hadn't noticed the smell and discovered it when he did, she probably would have died the next day.
Her kidneys failed. She was placed on dialysis and a ventilator; I flew four thousand miles to be with her as doctors frantically pumped massive amounts of antibiotics through her and told us that her chances were slim to none.
She was lucky. It all worked -- the antibiotics, the surgery to remove the affected area, and the plastic surgery to cover the wound.
The first poop story takes place about midway through her recovery in the hospital. Mom is happy that she can actually get up and go to the bathroom to shit and piss after a week of constipation and being on "auto-pee" -- our term for the Foley catheter she had in place. Problem is, Mom is hooked up to about three different IV solutions of vitamins, antibiotics, and what have you, all fed to her through an electric pump. This means she can't simply just get up and walk to the bathroom. She has to call a nurse who comes in, unplugs the pump on the IV pole and switches it to battery power, shuts off the alarm that promptly results, and helps my mom -- who is overweight, has balance problems, and is recovering from surgery on her side and has to walk on one leg that's pretty much been skinned by a skin graft used to repair the wound -- walk to the bathroom and get on the toilet. The nurse then situates the IV pole, pump, and tubing, leaves, waits for Mom to flush and get dressed, comes back in, does everything in reverse, and gets her back into bed.
This entire operation takes about fifteen minutes, with maybe three minutes of it as time when my mom actually takes a dump. This means that as soon as she feels she has to go, she rings the nurses' station so one can come help her. But because of nerve damage, she doesn't get a great deal of warning; she's got a limited amount of time before the dam breaks. She can't do what most of us on this site would do: wait until the last minute and make a run for it.
She found that out the hard way a few years ago when she ignored her bladder. Suddenly she realized the countdown was at T minus ten and counting. She ran for the bathroom, tripped on her stupid cat, fell down, and pissed herself. Now she goes the second she knows she has to, and no more accidents like that had happened. On top of all that, the antibiotics the doctors are making her take gives her diarrhea; so when she's got to go, she's got to go NOW!
Each day, my dad would go up to the hospital to visit in the morning and afternoon, coming back home (twenty minutes away) at noon to eat lunch and pick me up. One day, as I was waking up, I heard him slam in the house, cursing at the top of his lungs. I could hear him wrestling with a trash bag, and then I heard him start the washer outside the guest room and put something in it, swearing the whole time as he slammed down the lid and stormed upstairs.
Wisely, I took my time going upstairs so he had a chance to decompress. I ascended the steps, grabbed breakfast, and asked what the hell all the noise was about.
He told me. When he was visiting Mom, she got The Urge, and she promptly rang the bell. Five minutes pass. She rings it again.
Two more minutes pass. My dad had been told NEVER to help my mom to the bathroom because the nurses know how to help and support her better; plus I think they were afraid he'd screw up and disconnect the wrong plug while moving the IV pole or whatever. Mom is starting to get uncomfortable. My dad dashes out into the hall to find a nurse, any nurse. There's no nurses.
Screw this, he says. He runs back to the room, gets Mom unhooked and out of bed, and starts propelling her as fast as she can move towards the bathroom.
Too late. She loses control and craps all over the floor, her bathrobe, and the slippers my dad had just gotten her. She promptly bursts into tears of shame, because that had never happened to her before. Accidentally pissing yourself at home while alone is one thing -- you just clean up and get a new pair of pants and undies and that's that, no one's the wiser. Shitting yourself in front of your long-suffering husband in the hospital because the nurses couldn't be bothered to answer your repeated call attempts and ruining your clothes from home, as well as beshitting the floor -- that's quite another.
Dad calmed her down, cleaned her up, bagged up the befouled clothes, got her into bed, waited for her to go to sleep, and went out of the room to hunt heads.
It turned out all the nurses were screwing around gossiping in the break room, with no one at the desk to answer calls. He tore them all new assholes (he's half Italian and had just recently retired from the Air Force after thirty years of service, including time in Vietnam), started getting supervisors there, ripped their heads off too, and stormed to the parking lot to drive home and wash her clothes.
Now, I know nurses get busy. But everyone had left. And it wasn't the first time they had done that, either. They did it once when I was there, and it was time for my mom's pain medication, and it took thirty minutes to find someone to give it to her, by which time she's in a world of hurt. That was bad. Letting a patient shit herself because you're too busy catching up on who slept with whom is a hanging offense.
The next story took place last year. My parents had just moved to Florida so my mom could have some warm weather and start exercising more often. Every so often, they like to go to a diner and have a quiet meal together. They used to go to Denny's, but after one time in the 1990's, when they waited forty minutes for a table while there were plenty of empties and it wasn't busy, they left, my dad yelling as they went out the door. Now they go to IHOP.
This time, once seated, even though it wasn't busy and there was plenty of waitstaff present, they ended up having to wait a long time to order. My mom's diabetes is pretty bad so she has to eat on a regular schedule. Dad snagged someone and demanded service. Knowing my father, he probably said a whole lot more.
So they give their orders. And wait. And wait. Mom takes her before-meal insulin shot. Finally the meals arrive, and they'd screwed up my mom's meal. So they send it back. And wait, and wait some more. Mom's rather hungry by this point. They come back with the new meal, and it's still wrong. Dad makes it amply clear that he's not going to put up with this garbage, and if she doesn't have the correct meal in front of her in five minutes, they were getting everything for free. I'm sure he mentioned something about the staff's dubious parentage and sexual habits. Never piss off Italians.
Apparently, never piss off cooks, either. Mom's meal, correct this time, comes out in the five minutes. She starts eating. About ten minutes into the meal Mom looks up at Dad, breaks out in a sudden cold sweat, and says, "Something's wrong. I've got to take a shit NOW!"
She gets up and starts making her way unsteadily to the bathroom, hampered by the fact she's using a cane and is clenching with all her strength.
A horrible cramp hits her, and it's all over. Right there, in public, in front of God and fifty other people, she loses control and diarrhea explodes, through her underpants and shorts, down her legs, into her shoes, and all over the carpet.
My mother was TOTALLY embarrassed and humiliated. I mean, what can you do when you blow mud everywhere in front of diners at an IHOP? There's absolutely no way to exit gracefully with a pantsload of anal chili trailing behind you like breadcrumbs in a wacked out children's tale.
Dad goes into crisis mode. He throws money at the waitress and helps my now almost-hysterical mom out the restaurant. He gets her in the car, speeds home, and gets her in the tub so she can hose off the sludge. Her clothes were totally wrecked beyond redemption, down to her favorite shoes.
She had never ever had that happen except at the hospital a year ago; and there she had warning she had to go, and she knew her antibiotics were causing diarrhea; she just couldn't make it to the bathroom in time. This time, it just hit out of nowhere. She didn't even have anything wrong with her that day -- her blood sugar was fine, she took all her medication on time, she hadn't been sick with so much as a sniffle or a bowel rumble in months. One second she was fine, and then this cold, sickening wave washed over her, ending at her stomach, and she erupted like the four horsemen of the apocalypse without even a birth announcement of the coming of this anal antichrist.
The more they thought about it, the more they came to the same conclusion: some asshole in the kitchen, probably pissed off at my dad being such a chafed rectum, put something in the meal -- Ex-Lax, maybe, whatever -- probably as a joke, imagining my dad spending the night purging himself of things he ate five years ago. I doubt whoever did it expected my chronically ill mother, who's never hurt a single person in her life, to eat the meal and shit herself right there in the IHOP. At least they better not have been expecting that would happen. And because Dad was so worried about Mom and was just concerned with getting her out of there, he didn't think to take the meal with them and have it analyzed.
After they got home and she got cleaned up, they pretty much waited for a repeat; nothing happened. For hours, not even a fart escaped my mom's now-pristine cheeks, and after that she was right back to regular normal dumps with plenty of warning.
My dad called the manager the next day and told him about all the fuckups that had happened, ending with my mom's completely involuntary ass explosion, and mentioned they would never be eating at an IHOP ever again, even if they were starving to death and there was an IHOP two feet away. It was MONTHS before my dad could convince my mom to venture out in public again. She was scared to death that it would happen again. She's got self-esteem issues because she's overweight and having a hard time slimming down; shitting yourself in public doesn't exactly help boost self-confidence.
They now go to a small family diner near their house, where everyone knows them. Nothing like this has happened since. She gets The Urge, excuses herself, and gets to the throne in plenty of time.
Mom's doctor seconded my folks' guess, because when he saw her the next day, she was fine. She didn't have any parasites or viruses, and everything was running at green light by then.
I'm rather surprised my dad, with his Mediterranean outlook, didn't go back to that IHOP with an Uzi. Hell, I'm surprised Mom, who is Scottish-Irish-English and descended by marriage to George Washington himself, didn't show up packing heat. Or that they didn't call in backup from family members who live close by.
On a different note: last month Mom woke up with the right side of her face sagging like a shar-pei's. They thought she'd had a stroke. No, it's Bell's Palsy, a facial nerve paralysis that's treatable, but tends to hang around awhile. Again she won't go out in public, now because she doesn't like it when people watch her chew on one side of her mouth and hold her lips closed when she sips through a straw because that's the only way she can drink liquids right now. I don't know if any PoopReporters out there are of religious persuasion, but prayers for my mom's recovery would be much appreciated. No one should have to watch someone go through that -- especially if it's your sick mother.
-- The Artist Formerly Known As Poo-Poo