The Procedure of Which We Should Not Speak

8:15 a.m. – As is the customary morning ritual, I head to the bathroom to relieve myself with snarling teeth exposed. A few grunts later I make it to my bar and begin to formulate my anxiety tonic. Three ounces of smooth calm later I’m ready to go.

8:35 a.m. – I am dropped off at the clinic and make my way up the elevator while conversing with a man who has half an ankle, the result of a motorcycle injury. After discussing the pros and cons of negotiating eight hundred pound motor-beasts I walk from the vertical transport, down the hall and to the office.

8:50 a.m. – I’m in exam room number one. Before me sits a mechanical chair that looks like a hybrid stepchild from the union of an auto mechanic’s duty bay and an OBGYN’s rummage sale. There she is the extraction seat: piston levers, leg stirrup holders, swivel base, and padded cushions covered with that butcher paper that they lay on the equipment so you don’t either give the next guy something or receive it from the last patron.

8:55 a.m. – What an interesting position to be in, laid up in the hydraulic lift seat, legs in the stirrups fully exposed. I can’t help but have flashbacks of the many un-relatable conversations I’ve had with women as they’ve discussed and remarked about pap smears, yearly examines, and the strangeness of porn-like medical posturings. I turn my head east and see a television monitor and various elongated tubes and wires and thing-a-ma-jigs connected to an outlet that all say to me “Hi, we are here to invade your body cavity.” In my mind I hear the frightened voice of Daffy Duck saying, “Mother!?”.

9:00 a.m. – Doctor comes in and mumbles a few cordial words while busily reading my chart and asking where I’ve been for so long. I decided to confess that I’ve been both busy and chicken. Busy with a new job and chicken to submit to the fact that the psychological pain of the extraction-of-which-we-do-not-speak is far worse than the reality. After a comforting chuckle and some reassuring formalities he informs me that he is about to administer a numbing gel into the end of my extremity-of-which-we-should-not-speak. Daffy!!!!??? Help!!!!

9:10 a.m. – Nurse enters and gracefully avoids staring directly at me while making distracting chit chat but I know that those thing-a-ma-jigs are about to be used and I’m not letting anyone out of my sight.

9:15 a.m. – Doctor lets me know that they will be putting in one of those elongated tubes and filling me with some water to get the endoscope in. I feel my insides pressurizing. Just as he’s passing the prostate he says, “Okay, now this is the worse part and …” That’s all I heard before it felt like my entire region-of-which-we-should-not-probe was going to explode in aquatic agony. But, in about three seconds it subsided.

9:18 a.m. – Nurse informs me that I can view the monitor at my leisure to watch them grab the stent. I oblige and watch as this hemostatic-alligator jaw clamps down on the end of the stent’s loop resting just inside my bladder. There’s a certain surreal moment in all of this where you begin to think that you are really watching someone else on TLC and not your own inner workings in full color.

9:20 a.m. – “Alright now, here we go I’m going to pull it out and….” Zip. Pluck. In one swift yank the entire stent is out. The nurse holds it up for examination as if it were a freshly uncorked wine bottle. I cannot describe the feeling. Strange day.

9:25 a.m. – Everyone leaves the room and I’m told I can wipe up and get dressed. I look around the exam room as the buzz turns silent and I realize that I’m all alone with a certain peculiar sense of having been violated by the stent horde. Co-pay collected. Procedure done. NEXT!

9:35 a.m. – I find out that I have calcium stones and that I’ve got to participate in a Litholink Kidney Stone Prevention Program whereby I collect my urine for a twenty-four hour period and FedEx it to a lab. The fun never ends does it?

I just keep reminding myself that I could have a leech on my flank and head back home.