LOM Chapter 15. Inconclusive

In my next appointment with him, Dr. Peynbachs told me that the barium enema had been inconclusive. He still didn’t know what was wrong with me, and wanted another stool sample.

That appointment was two weeks before my first day of class in my senior year of high school. At the appointment the nurse noted on my chart that I was five-foot-eight and weighed 118 pounds. Even without laxative prep regimens, I was having a minimum of six bowel movements a day–and that was a good day. I spent most days lying on the couch between trips to the toilet, afraid to answer the telephone. My diet had been reduced to toast, rice, roast beef, chicken breast, bananas, and apple sauce, and it had all become disgusting. Nothing seemed to stop the diarrhea.

I had been to a half dozen doctors’ appointments in two months, in the course of which I had proffered blood, urine, and stool samples by the quart. I had filled so many plastic tubes with my own feces that I had begun to believe there might be a secondary market for it. I had become quite adept at using the slender tubes with the built-in spoon to scoop up the foulest portions of my excrement for the benefit of medical science–all for no result. The microscopes and the smears and the cultures showed nothing unusual, ever. There were no ova, no animals, no bacteria, nothing in all that filth to even hint that I might have a problem. To judge by my stool samples, I was perfectly healthy—not dehydrated, malnourished, and underweight from chronic diarrhea.

I had gone to that first appointment blithely confident that Kudafer would solve the problem. That was always how it had worked before. I got sick, I went to see Dr. Kudafer, I got better. Even if the illness came back, I could always go back and get more medicine and feel better again. When I was little and suffered recurrent ear infections, I must have drunk gallons of amoxicillin—a sweet pink liquid we kept in the refrigerator. I always felt better, at least until the infection returned. When I was four I had a broken arm wrapped in plaster that smelled like vinegar when the cast came off six weeks later. I vaguely remember the chicken pox, too, and I remember that it went away eventually. When I had strep throat, the antibiotics took care of it in a few weeks.

Dr. Peynbachs told me that he wanted to do yet another test: a colonoscopy. He told me that the colonoscopy was not as bad as it sounded, that I would be sedated for it and probably would not remember a thing afterwards. Nothing he said changed the fact that he wanted to stuff a camera into my ass. The nurse came in with photocopied instructions for my “bowel prep” for the colonoscopy – which meant more laxatives. She handed me a bottle that looked like soda but said “Magnesium Citrate” on the label.

“My diarrhea’s so bad, couldn’t I just not eat anything for a couple days and flush it out with water?” I asked. She said no and told me to schedule the procedures with the front desk as I left.

Because there was sedation involved, I was not supposed to do anything after my colonoscopy. The problem was that the first day of school was fast approaching—not quite two weeks away at that point—and I wanted to get the procedure out of the way before then.

“The soonest we can fit you in is a week from Friday, at 9 AM,” said the receptionist. I signed up for the appointment.

League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.