Pining about my sorry state—the disappeared Cleo with whom I am in love, Ginger who treats me like crap, Benjie who seems to be in love with me, Mr. C who is promising to make my life a living hell—I toddled into the bathroom after Skeeter today and only noticed, after he had closed the door, that he was not there to shave or brush his teeth. (I don't know why, but I find the morning rituals of humans fascinating.) He was going to "change his appliance."Now I've written before about how I sat through this hideous process once and never wanted to see it again, but that was before the two of us got to talking. Although this time wasn't promising to be any less hideous, at least it would be informative (if I could only talk instead of dry-heave).
I opened with, "I don't really want to be here, you know."
He said, "Neither do I. But you don't have to, so if you want you can go."
"I would, but I sorta want to know what the hell has happened to you and what this is all about. I suspect it would explain some things—"
"—things?—" he said as he took out all sorts of gizmos and gadgets and set them out around the bathroom.
"—your generally pissy moods, for instance." He grumped a little and then started to cut things. "So what is all this crap and why do you have to do it?"
"I had an operation. They took out a huge chunk of the tail-end of my digestive tract, and now what is the new tail-end actually comes out of a hole in my belly."
"To do what, exactly?" He said nothing but he didn't have to because it was a 'tard question—to do what the old tail-end used to do, I realized. I said, in a weak voice, "Fascinating!" and tried to mean it.
"So every four days or so, I have to remove the appliance, as they call it, and clean the part of my body under the appliance and put on a new appliance."
"And this appliance is what?" I asked, jumping up onto the toilet seat to get a better look (instead of, like last time, cringing and wincing in the corner). The way I was now seeing it was that this was about shit. Dogs know shit. We don't care about shit. We even like shit. Humans, on the other hand, seem to have a phobia about it (unless it comes out of a baby and then it's like Christmas Day, for some reason).
But Skeeter was just going along, placing things and removing things and cutting things like this was the most banal thing in the world and for that, I gotta say, I admired him a little. Then there was something—something coming out of him and I couldn't help freaking. "What the fuck is that!!!"
"Simmer down," he said, as he worked with and washed around the thing coming out of him (do you get me? IT WAS COMING OUT OF HIM!!!). "That," he said almost proudly, "is my intestine except now they call it a stoma and it has to be tended to like a baby and protected and cleaned and the skin around it too and that's the worst part of the job and also the most interesting part because—let's face it—not everyone gets to fiddle about with their own internal organs."
"Wow," I said and it truly was fascinating right then.
After he'd done the cleaning and what not, he placed a big plastic plate around that thing which glued down to his skin and then over the plate he clipped a bag (the engineering here is mind-blowing—that bag clipped right to the plate...a perfect fit). Then he sighed very, very, very deeply. "There, the worst is done and there was no accident."
"Accident?" I asked, looking at him through the mirror.
"Sometimes the thing is...uh...active and then it gets messy and you have to move fast but if you move too fast nothing works and—"
"—you start screaming and swearing like a whore on Saturday night!"
"You've heard," he said, and smiled.
"The whole fucking neighbourhood has heard. They think Boo-Boo beats you."
He laughed and I snerfed a chuckle. "So now you know," he said. "Any questions?"
"Does everyone know you have this?" I asked.
"Good question," he said as he tidied up the bathroom. "Everyone who wants to know knows because I don't hide it. But there are a lot of people, even in my own friends and family, who just don't want to know."
"Why, do you think?"
"I've thought of that," he said, finishing up the cleaning. There was a silence until he was done and then he picked me up and carried me out and over to the La-Z-Boy. Finally he spoke, "Because it is what it is. Because it's not polite dinner conversation. Because it's horrifying to many (as it was to me at first—I used to cry and cry). But that's not it, mostly." He paused for a second and we rocked in the chair for a bit. "I think it's a case of: 'there—but for the grace of God—go I.'"
"Hunh?"
"People don't want to know because they don't want to imagine it happening to them. It's like cancer and the throwing up and shit and hair-loss. You can say, 'Poor you, you have cancer,' and mean it to a certain extent but no one wants to know the full extent of the bodily upheaval that comes with cancer or this or any serious illness because it's too easy to imagine their own fragile, aging bodies someday becoming a victim of that kind of upheaval. It's why people fear doctors, hospitals, surgery (lordie—just the talk of a possible surgery turns people in jelly) and it's also why some people would rather die in their sleep or get hit by a car, tomorrow, than have something like this. It's mortality. It's the slowing down. It's facing the end."
"And for you?"
"I used to think like that too. I could never imagine I would be like this, doing this, even a few years ago. But the oldest cliché in the book is utterly, utterly true..."
"'Where there's life, there's hope,'" I mumbled.
"Yup."
"Does it hurt?" I asked.
"Nope."
"If I grabbed on it and chewed it while we were play-fighting?—"
"—you would probably win the fight, but I also might punt you across the living room."
"Ah!" I mumbled, "the woes of being a small dog."
"Oh boo-hoo," he said and, unlike an hour ago (before the appliance change) there was a whiff of sarcasm and good humour in him.
It was turning into one of those icky-sticky, touchy-feely moments I hate so much so I said, "Let's watch 'Bargain Hunt.'" And we did.
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