Some of you don’t know this, but I teach 8th
grade. 8th graders are the
strangest creatures. They look like
mostly formed adults, they talk like mostly formed adults.
However, they are still children.
I’ve only been teaching 8th grade for 2 years
now, but I’m starting to believe there is a tangible reason I’m teaching
here…. In a lot of ways I’m just as
immature as them.
So, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, tonight’s blog
post is about…. Poop.
Before I begin to sing the praises of pooping (and I shall),
I must announce, with sorrow, that Shelley has ordered me NOT to write a blog
post about poop, as it is inappropriate, and not to be shared.
I shall now cast aside her concerns and plunge (I fear there
may be many puns in here, beware) forward with my tale.
I like to joke about poop.
I like to make random poop comments to students. I once took a picture of this EPIC blowout
when Anya was a kid in which the poop shot up into her armpits and stained her
onesie like a Rorschach test blot.
In probably my worst parenting moments, but one I bond with
Anya the most in…I try to make her ask for Poopcorn at Target when we stop in
to get it afterschool. She is totally
out of her mind with embarrassment, but she wants the popco…er Poopcorn so much
that she considers it…but then she reconsiders it because we’re NOT SUPPOSED TO
TALK ABOUT POOP. …and that’s kinda the point of this post.
For those of you who are new to the cancer
thing….chemotherapy is not kind to the body in many ways, but one of the most dynamic
ways for Amelie is that she has massive pooping problems.
She starts out her chemotherapy rounds (each round is
roughly a month) with massive constipation.
As of tonight, she was on day #6.
Thought experiment:
- · Go to McDonalds, and buy 3 hamburgers. The basic ones.
- · Take a bite. Chew it up. Don’t swallow.
- · Keep doing this until you have every square inch of your mouth fully extended.
- · DO NOT SWALLOW.
·
This is what Amie’s abdomen looks like.
We use lactulose. We
use miralax. We use Colace. We soften. We hurry. We push it out, push it out, way out. It doesn’t move. You don’t want it to get too packed in there,
as it could rupture.
But any of you who are still reading (are any of you still
reading?), you’re thinking about the balance of power. The Jedi vs. the Sith. The Yin and the Yang. U-M vs. MSU.
If you give too much of the poop interventions, you end up
swinging the pendulum back the other way too far, and that’s possibly even
worse. Once the 2nd half of
the chemotherapy trick sets in, you’re already going to have that problem. Accelerate it even more, and you’ve got
disaster. Ya see, the chemotherapy, in
addition to the prophylactic antibiotics, wreaks havoc on the balance of
bacteria in the GI tract. You swing from constipation land to diarrheaville. Not a fun detour.
I was driving home tonight thinking of how absolutely lucky
most people are to be as good of poopers as they are. We DON’T TALK ABOUT POOPING, but it’s one of
the most essential parts of our own happiness. Doubt me on that one? Eat a box of Imodium and call me in a week
with a report.
Anyway, I’m starting to lose my amusement for the whole
thing, so I’ll share the last few bits of information.
I had a few spare minutes earlier today and made this
design. I'm seriously considering designing and selling T-Shirts and Patches for this...
It’s in honor of today.
Today’s the 2nd, #2 in some places. From now on, when I’ve got to head to the
toilet, I’m going to be going in for a 6-2 (todays’ date). For me, like Kramer with Festivus, I’m
creating a national holiday. National
Healthy Pooping Day.
As of a few minutes ago, Amie came out and announced that
she’d pooped in her sleep. (wrap your
heads around that one!) She popped out a baseball sized chunk, and there’s
probably a ton more where that came from in the days to come. But she’s far more comfortable, far more able
to sleep, and maybe…just maybe… we’ll
get to sleep through the night tonight.
Just a reminder: For
those interested, B-Dubs fundraiser is on Wednesday!
No comments:
Post a Comment