Wednesday, January 16, 2019

The Dumpling

Why? What does your plunger look like?
My insurance company sent me a card on my birthday, just like Grandma used to do, only instead of having a five-dollar bill in it, it had a home colon screening kit. I sent Grandma a thank-you note every year, but these folks want something different.

It's pretty easy, but you do have to think about it. Weeks can pass by when you do what you're used to doing and then go, oh crap. I forgot to do the kit again. And it's a little problematic because most of the time when I'm on the toilet all kinds of things can happen. Well not all kinds, but one thing or the other. And in this case, you don't want the One thing, you just want the Other thing.

But finally I remembered to get out the kit at just the right time, at the E.T.A. of the B.M., and I unfolded the tissue paper and laid it neatly on the water surface, and everything was going just fine. Then you get the little twiddle stick and twiddle it in your Issue Of The Residuum, pack it away, and mail it off. It's a tiny twiddler. It looks like a toothbrush for a shrew. You only have the one shot at it, but I had a lot to work with, so I picked a particularly nice spot to twiddle. You don't want to be sending off a corn kernel on a stick.

I packed off my nice sample, fine of texture and hue, and then I cleaned up per usual and gave 'er a flush.

I will pause here to note that I have never plugged up the toilet I use regularly, as it were. My toilet and I are on the same page. Other people have plugged up the toilet. Or more often they make it run on and on. We have a toilet with a little handle in the center of the tank. I thought it was adorable when we picked it out but it has its drawbacks. You are supposed to pull it up gently, but for some reason guests like to reef on it like they're starting up a lawn mower, and then the little chain gets overexcited and bunches up, and the toilet runs on and on. And because you can't just take the tank lid all the way off, because the chain is attached to it, you have to try to fix it blind with your arm jammed under the lid.

But I have never plugged up my toilet. Until now.

I flushed gently, and watched the perfectly centered tissue paper fold up neatly around my production like a Chinese bao--oh, let's go ahead and call it a Dumpling--and wedge itself in the go-away hole. And there it sat, a big toilet bolus. It wasn't awful to look at or anything--it was very neatly wrapped indeed. A bow wouldn't have been at all out of place.

I've certainly plugged up a toilet before. Not mine. Notably, I once visited a world of hurt on the spotless bathroom belonging to an obsessively tidy gentleman who threw himself off a bridge shortly after the incident, and I'm not even kidding. But my record with my own toilet is clean. So this was a situation. Several flushes served only to send the water level to the uh-oh zone. I was not at all inclined to sacrifice a barbecue fork, although I believe a simple perforation would have done the trick. Finally I annoyed the bolus with a plunger and it slipped the swirly bonds. No harm done.

But I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the tidy dead gentleman, and I'm sorry to have handed my mailman a biohazard, and I'm sorry to have stressed out my toilet. Really, I should apologize to my toilet every day. It was such a champ during my last actual colonoscopy prep. I'm not a bit sorry about anything that might have happened during my colonoscopy. Those people had it coming.

27 comments:

  1. You know your insurance company can get a DNA sample now. They will find the stuff you are genetically predisposed to get and will sneakily write a disclaimer into your insurance policy that won't cover it. I am sure your insurance company wouldn't do something as low as that, though. Hope I didn't ruin your mood because never having clogged your own toilet is really something to be proud of. Wish I could say the same thing for myself.

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    1. I pride myself on being paranoid, but I didn't think of that! I salute you. Paranoia is simply heightened awareness.

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    2. It's heightened SOMETHING, anyway!

      Today I appear to have the whooping cough for some reason. I think anyone within a mile can get a nice DNA sample from me.

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  2. The commercial for those tests says it can produce false negatives and false positives. Also, a real lab would tell you that as soon as the sample hits the toilet water, it's contaminated. Imagine how icky something has to be to contaminate yer dookie.

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    1. Kaiser Permanente sends them to me. I do trust them. Maybe I shouldn't, but how many of you can say you love your medical insurance?

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    2. I do love mine! Medicare and Tricare For Life. I would wish it on everyone in America.

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  3. My dog woulda spent all day barking at your plunger.

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    1. One Christmas I made a bunch of family members their own plungers. With mini-plungers to match: a bittern and bittern chick; blue jay and jay chick; quail and quail chick; one for my piano teacher, of Franz Liszt; and this one for Dave, of our dog Boomer.

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  4. I read this while eating refries and enchiladas. Not so hungry now. 🤣

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  5. My east-coast Kaiser Permanente doesn't send these kits to me -- does this mean that Grandma Permanente likes you best? Either way, I loved "slipped the swirly bonds" -- your mind certainly does work in interesting ways!

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    1. Does Grandma Perm like you to have colonoscopies instead? I think I get these because I "passed" my age-fifty colonoscopy with flying colors...no wait, that ain't right.

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  6. "Slipped the swirly bonds..."

    I doff my chapeau in your direction.

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  7. I caught the "swirly bonds" reference, too.

    So many good lines; you were on fire when you wrote this!

    Our instructions don't allow for anything to touch the toilet water so I wondered about that the same as unmitigated me did. Seems like you'd need a half a roll of TP just to keep everything afloat. I can't believe I'm writing that. Anyhow, no wonder you had a bolus.

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    1. One could probably rig up a coffee filter to be in the correct position with some tape. Let any liquids filter out into the bowl, get your swab from the solids, then dispose of the filter in the trash. NOT the toilet, or the filter may cause clogging. Or, if you have a neighbor that you intensely dislike, you can set it alight on their doorstep and ring the doorbell.

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    2. mimimanderly, do kids still do the fiery poop thing out your way?

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    3. Out my way, they never did. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it....

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    4. YOU GUYS! Anyway, they sent a piece of some kind of tissue paper with the kit. Everything plated up nicely and I do not believe there was any water incursion, inasmuch as it sat high and dry.

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  8. I have a problem with laying that tissue on the water, because any "residuum" (great word) immediately sinks that paper so my fingers get wet when twiddling the little stick. So I changed my method. I got an old fashioned chamber pot sized icecream container and line that with toilet paper instead of that tissue sheet. Then when I'm done twiddling I just empty the whole thing into the toilet and flush it.

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    1. Huh. I wonder why my residuum (Aristotle: see my sea urchin post) doesn't sink it? Now I'm feeling inadequate.

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  9. My LOL for this one was “You don’t want to be sending off a corn kernel on a stick”. Nobody else can make me laugh about things of a scatilogical nature as hard as my 4-9 yr old grandkids do.

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    1. I don't know what it is about corn kernels. I THINK I'm chewing.

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  10. Your American plumbing is ...I'll politely just say "different" from plumbing in these regions.
    You chaps begin with a full bowl and gravity does its swirly bonds thing. We have a little water at the bottom of the pan and flushing sends a veritable Niagara down from some height to become swirly. It achieves the same end result. The big difference is in the instruction to collect said material. "Because it is important that the material NOT be water-contaminated, we ask that you stretch a length of toilet paper across the rim of the bowl;it may be necessary to secure it with Sellotape."
    I wonder what the instruction would be for the folk who still employ the "long-drop dunny"

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    1. To my amazement, I was able to Google "long-drop" and it finished with "dunny" before I even got it out. So now I know what you're talking about, AND I have a lovely lyrical new phrase. Long-drop dunny needs to be in a song.

      But you reminded me of the toilets I encountered when I visited Germany in 1972. I wonder if they still have them. There's a platform for your residuum so you can admire it all you want, and then the water comes whooshing out from the back and blasts it away. They wouldn't need tissue at all.

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