More Toilet Humour

This week, Tuesday to be exact, I got a parasite and bacterial infection in my stomach, possibly from a paté and baguette snack I had for lunch from a street stall. It’s par for the course here, out on the cutting edge, in the thick of it, on the streets in Saigon. Within the space of an hour, I went from not being sick, to being sick; within the space of an evening, I went from being a reasonably well-functioning human, to being that girl in the exorcist movie, just near the end, after weeks of her body being ravaged by an unseen demon. I had a fever and body pain that would kill a small pony, my feet hurt, my hands hurt, the base of my spine hurt so much I almost performed ad hoc, spontaneous surgery on myself with my Japanese kitchen knife. Make no mistake, microscopic bugs will, one day, inherit the earth. Also, there was the diarrhoea…my lord, the diarrhoea; and it was the stench of death, the trenches of World War I, the decay of bayoneted bodies, streams, torrents…

On the whole, it was unpleasant.

I went to an international medical clinic and, within two hours, had spent more than five-hundred US dollars; luckily I have medical insurance. It seems that these kinds of symptoms can manifest from a variety of causes and even Dengue Fever can show as a kind of gastro-intestinal affair. So a variety of tests, including various blood tests and stool sample tests are needed.

The nurse gave me a plastic bag, a pair of rubber gloves and a small cylindrical Tupperware container and told me to go get a stool sample. Now, it needs to be said, that, next to the internet and the discovery of how to turn grapes into wine, I regard the flushing toilet and the sewerage system as the greatest of mankind’s inventions. I love that I don’t have to mess with my own shit too much. I looked at this tiny plastic container and looked up into the nurse’s face from my seated position. The words ‘stool sample’ sat heavily in my mind, kinda solid…like a chair or a piece of wood. It seemed impossible to get something so solid as a ‘stool’ into this tiny little jar, until I remembered that my stool was anything but solid. Still, there was going to be dexterity involved…certainly some acrobatics. I knew I would have to visualize it first, before actually doing it, kinda like how basketball players visualize the ball going into the net before taking the shot.

Needless to say, the whole event went badly. The gloves were thin and tight. It took me some moments to realize that I had one on the wrong way around, thumb on pinky, as it were. The only way to take these gloves off again, is to turn them inside out, then I would have to turn them back the right way again, then attempt the whole process once more. I decided to go ahead with the procedure with leftover bits of glove fingers dangling about. I went to take my pants down and immediately got one of these dangly rubber fingers caught in my zip; I was suddenly Mr Bean, about to perform open heart surgery. After several attempts at freeing the rubber finger from my zipper, I decided to just pull it out, thereby making a small tear in the glove. Security had been compromised. Should I go out and ask for more gloves? But, what could I say? That I had got them stuck in my zipper? That I was a complete moron who could take the simplest of tasks and turn it into a complete comedy of errors? No, I would have to go in, regardless. I wasn’t leaving this cubicle without some shit.

Of course, there are more details, but these are mere mechanics, needless to say, I succeeded in collecting a small sample, not too much, I figured they didn’t need too much. I put the jar in the plastic bag, deposited the gloves in the wastepaper bin and washed extensively in the basin. Then, outside, I walked sheepishly past the other waiting patients, and, knowing how ridiculous and how unbelievable this would be, still, I tried to give the impression that this plastic bag I was carrying through the waiting room was, in fact, my lunch that I had brought with me or a little shopping that I had quickly ducked out to get and not, as was obvious to everyone, a bag of shit. I walked into the nurses room and held up the bag. The nurse beamed at me, obviously thoroughly impressed, and said, “You got it!” Evidently, she too had had her doubts.

But there is something freeing about getting sick; the world gets funny again. Okay, not at the time, and, perhaps, only provided that you get well again. Getting sick puts everything back in its proper place and it’s probably the only time I ever really relax.