You can reach the author at basementfiles@hotmail.com

Thursday, June 12, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Basement Files: Whining, part two

Chemistry

For a week now, I've had a toothache that demands immediate attention and a bank account that doesn't respond well to demands. (In fact, it can get a little defensive around all authority figures.) In my life, there's often a delay between the onset of pain and the clinical treatment of its source. In the interim, I have to rely on old-fashioned home remedies, like stealing Vicodin from a friend's medicine cabinet.

And while I know little of the chemical intricacies of modern medicine's war on pain, I do know its battlefield strategies haven't changed since the time of Clausewitz. It is still a matter of indiscriminate artillery and blood-soaked soil. Overwhelming force is brought to bear on a populace and infrastructure already weakened by civil strife. Under the siege of Vicodin, I never get the impression that smart bombs are being laser-guided to critical neurotransmitters and receptors. No, this is Vietnam-era carpet bombing and I am but a thatched hut.

It's tempting to blame pain itself for the casualty rate among innocents, as it routinely barricades itself amid the hospitals and schools of healthy, pain-free cells. I can only drop Vicodin from above and hope the maimed and widowed villagers ultimately will forgive those who seek to liberate them from pain's tyranny. (Just the appearance of pain should be a dropped-leaflet campaign for neighboring tissues, a sign that war is coming and a suggestion that should they have relatives in the bladder, this might be a good time to visit.)

Once the bombing starts, my mind grows dull and hazy, my muscles slow to respond. Even the finer mechanisms like peristalsis sputter to a halt. In short, everything that makes me human is destroyed. And by that I mean, of course, my morning shit.

Physiology

I can't account for my toddler years, but since the age of 3 I've known constipation only as an abstract, if common, noun. I thought it was something that plagued only the pregnant and the aged, those at the extremes of potential and depleted life. But now, after three days of diminished hunger and two days of Vicodin, I am frozen like the Volga in February.

Day One dawns as little more than a curiosity, an insult to your morning routine for which nature is almost certain to extend a gracious and lavish apology sometime after lunch. When no reparations are offered, you retire with the hope that the colon's workers will return from their day off refreshed and ready to double their normal output. But even as sleep comes, you begin to suspect that Vicodin is a union agitator and that morning will bring picketing workers and scabs' cars pelted with rocks.

Sure enough, Day Two ushers in a full-blown work stoppage. I suppose the theory behind constipation is simple enough. Things taken in as nourishment have tarried, and in their delay turned to poison. But nothing can adequately explain the haste or the severity of the poisoning. And while the mulch is decomposing in my intestines, it's my skull, cramped and dizzy with noxious gases, that registers the body's toxicity. If the intestines are my body's coal mine, my head is the stunned and gasping canary.

Soon enough, the lower body announces its distress. Storage areas are near capacity and effluvium laps at the containers' rims. I begin moving slowly, with exaggerated caution, like someone defusing a bomb underwater. I worry that any sudden motion might roil the surface of the fetid pool below, rupturing its protective pudding skin and venting a fresh wave of putrid fumes.

By Day Three, just the sight of the toilet taunts me, like the pre-Santa gifts already wrapped and nestled beneath the tree in the weeks before Christmas. I know they await my pleasure, but at a time so remote as to confound a child's feeble reckoning. At its worst, I consider forcing down an apple, the Soviet icebreaker of fiber, but the thought of eating sickens me. And worse, the pain in my jaw has intensified, making certain that Vicodin's blizzard will once more fall on Moscow's stranded boatmen. Sickness demands a spring thaw, but pain keeps seeding the clouds with snow.

Geology

"Oh, yeah, that thing's badly infected." Since borrowing the money to see the dentist, these are the first words I've heard that hint at something other than a personal failure as the cause of my suffering. "I'm gonna give you some Biaxin. It's a pretty powerful antibiotic and it ought to knock that thing right out." And these the first words to suggest that the cure for what ails me is something other than stiffer discipline, greater maturity or a closer reading of the Scriptures.

I ask for free samples, of course, which is the equivalent of raiding your friend's medicine cabinet while he looks on. And I've swallowed two Biaxin before I clear the guy's lobby. But on the drive home, I begin to feel these piercing, intestinal flashes, like heat lightning on warm Midwestern night. Not an immediate threat, but a sign that a storm is brewing. And it suddenly occurs to me that dumping modern, ass-kicking antibiotics into my constipated system is like testing a thermonuclear device beneath Turkish fault lines.

Sure enough, by the time I'm home, two vast tectonic plates of feces are pushing against each other with unimaginable pressure. The resulting friction and heat have reduced their leading edges to molten magma. The earth cannot hold. The boiling lava and its superheated gases must find a fissure or create their own. A deep, ominous rumbling and the premature venting of poisonous vapors signal the impending eruption. And then, suddenly, the earth cracks open and an island is born.