This is a post about poop.

I don’t think any website is complete without a post dedicated to poop, so here’s one now.

Half the people in my house have caught the stomach flu that’s been going around recently. It’s the kind that makes you spew liquidy things at high velocity from both ends with enough frequency to dehydrate in a matter of hours. The toilets end up getting major workouts as they’re put through five times their normal paces, and the scent of Lysol hangs ever so delicately (<Borat>not!</Borat>) in the air because disinfectants must be sprayed on everything.

And that leaves me in my current predicament. I’m now an unwilling participant in a game of Diarrhea Roulette. I’ve managed to dodge the bullet thus far (knock on wood), but there’s no telling if in a day or two I’ll end up spending half my waking hours practicing contortionism to get my ass over the toilet and my head within suitable range of the bathtub.

One of the flu catchers is over it by now, but these past few days she’s taken to coughing wildly at night loud enough to keep everyone (including herself, of course) awake. Given the options, however, I’d take the coughs over violent double-ended squirts in an instant if I had to choose. While watery eyes and a painfully red throat aren’t that cool, it definitely beats pooping stinky water 14 times a day. And it beats getting your asshole rubbed raw by toilet paper that seems moderately comfortable the first two times but subsequently makes your sphincter pucker up in fear whenever it approaches.

The last time I was sick — like, really sick, not “Oh, noes! A cold!” sick — was when I contracted pneumonia during my sophomore year at school. Being sick is something I’ve mostly managed to avoid, though I guess my punishment for that might be my constant sinus problems. It’s been years since I last vomited, and the prospect is not one I enjoy, especially when I wouldn’t even be able to properly concentrate on it because I’d be more worried about flinging poo goo about the room.

As far as the pneumonia, during the summer preceding that school year I managed to get two centimeter-long wooden splinters jammed up under my right ring fingernail. It still gives me the willies thinking about that and how much it fucking hurt. I had to go to the doctor and get the nail ripped off with a pair of pliers — no joke! — so they could extract the stabby bits of wood. By the time they were wrapping my finger up the local anesthetic had worn off and I had to endure direct touches to the squishy nougat (comprised of ten million nerve endings of death) where my fingernail had once been.

Fast-forward at least six months and my nail is starting to grow back to its normal state, but I soon realized it had begun to hurt a lot with even the lightest of contact, similar to when the splinters so generously tore their way into what’s got to be one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. And then the nail started turning green on its right side. Turns out it’d managed to get infected, and it was this infection that paved the way for the pneumonia.

While my immune system is usually somewhat strong (I guess; it might just be my avoidant personality keeping me away from people and their cooties), the fingernail infection definitely toppled its defenses, and I guess the bacteria took up residence in one of my lungs. After three days of flu-like symptoms I couldn’t even move out of my chair/bed because I was so weak and sore. A trip to the doctor got me a prescription of some antibacterial pills big enough for a large mammalian being from eons past, and those things cleared both infections right up.

The end? I don’t know where I was going with that little anecdote, but I guess it kept the entire post from being about poop, and that’s good, right?