*Warning: A scatological discussion follows. Shit will happen. It will be stirred and hit the fan. I will, and no doubt you will too, find yourself knee-deep in it. Yes it’s all a bit Freudian, but Dr. Freud has his place and fifty can be fabulous if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and do the work, compost yourself, see what seeds are waiting to grow.
I was a few days home from the hospital when it came, a sure marker of fifty -- The Colon Health Check kit. Even accompanied as it was by a friendly letter from my doctor (not to mention an 800 number to call if I needed any help, with poop, really?), given where I had been and all that happened, a stool sample was the last thing I wanted to deal with. So I let it sit there on the dining room table, let stuff settle around and atop it. I knew I’d have to deal with it some time, just not then, not quite yet.
Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. The dining room table groaned under all I piled on it. I saw my Cardiologist and was released back to work. A letter came from my doctor reminding me of the importance of a healthy colon. Yeah, yeah. I was back to work and as tired as they told me I’d be. It’s all about endurance and building it back up to what it was, maybe to more than what it was. Looking back, and I was doing a lot of looking back since the surgery, I could see how exhausted I had been, how I pushed myself to keep going, and how my poor body had finally pushed back. My colon would have to wait; it was all I could do to get through the day. The dining room table would have to stay piled just a bit longer. Resuming your life is a process. It takes time. And the rush and hurry of my days before somehow seemed wrong in this time marked after.
Of course the time came when I found I had enough energy to begin to tackle all I couldn’t for so long. The dining room table had become the measure of all I had put off for another day, all that could wait and now, at last, should, could, and would be dealt with. It took a while, but I found my way to the Colon Health Check kit. I opened it, finally, scanned the letter, reviewed the contents, thought soon, soon. A week later I looked at it again, noted a critical component missing (God alone knows what happened to it), and problem solved how to compensate. “Monday,” I said to myself. “Monday,” I promised.
When the toilet backed-up on Sunday, I didn’t think much about it. After all, it wasn’t happening to me. I wasn’t the one standing in my own shit, trying to get a handle on it. I offered to help but that offer was thankfully refused. I kept doing what I was doing, secure in the fact I had mastered what my significant other was just starting to deal with. I knew my shit. I had stood in it, sometimes knee deep, the past few years. I had found myself up my own shit creek without a paddle and had to find my way home. I didn’t need such literal messages, or did I? Hmmmm.
The first time your unconscious greets you with what you’ve been avoiding, at least in my world anyway, it eschews subtlety. It seems literal messages are what I understand best, so when I find myself in my life unable to take the next step, I get diagnosed with severe arthritis in my right hip requiring a hip resurfacing. I literally have to learn to walk again, from scratch. I have to fight for every step, hobble before I can walk, walk before I can run. When my heart breaks, it literally breaks, requiring hospitalization, surgery, a chest broken open, a heart renewed and revised since the old one just couldn’t manage any more.
So, here I was post-bypass, knowing I had to figure out my history’s lessons lest I repeat them, and slowly, surely trying to do just that. Or was I? Hmmmmm. True I wasn’t facing an overflowing toilet, but I still had deal with shit. The Colon Health Check kit was sitting there on the newly cleaned dining room table and Monday, P-day, was nearly upon me, tomorrow. I had faced the fact I was full of shit years ago, but that didn’t mean my dealings with my waste were past me. Nope, shit still happens and if there was any hope in getting mine together, I was going to have to do the work. It would be more refined this time, requiring ingenuity, detail work, excavation and exposure. I’d have to figure out how to give a shit, get it done, get it together and get it in the mail. And I’d have to wait, have faith, hope that this test, unlike the blood test that revealed my heart attack, would come up negative.
Of course I didn’t really put any of this together until I was sitting with my therapist, talking about the last few weeks. Maybe that’s why I have to be so literal. I don’t get it any other way. I have to start from scratch, learn to crawl before I can walk, have my heart break and piece it back together, bypass what can’t be gotten through. And I have to, from time to time, realize shit happens and then deal with it, get a sample even, let others look at it and tell me it’s a-ok.
So says fifty. Can’t wait to see what 51 says.
