Life: Scene 2, Take 1 Or 2
It's sad really only if you think it is, the image of a man standing in front of a pedestal sink, pushed up a little on the balls of his feet and leaning forward so that his penis, held lovingly in his hands, will clear the ceramic edge, him searching expectantly the flow of urine into a screened funnel for foreign treasure. Like panning for gold he picks through the paltry particles remaining on top of the fine mesh with a sliver of oak shaved from a scrap plank. "Is that a speck of dried blood?" he wonders aloud as he picks it out and sticks it to the side of a plastic specimen bottle. Hardly seems possible that it could be dried blood but it's dark and the doctor had said there was blood in his urine. He harkens back to his days as a junior hobo when in San Francisco a thorazine carrying Vietnam Vet was trying to school him on how to cheat the government out of assistance dollars. "The surest way to get disability dollars is to prick your finger and put a drop of blood in your urine specimen bottle." At the time he was just a middle class kid, dropped out from college, trying to travel on the cheap, and he had opted for the less deceitful and smaller payoff of the Mission District blood bank.
In the present he spies another minute specimen resting on top of the mesh and picking it out with the sharp oak point it appears gelatinous, with a fine thread of a tail and he wonders if it could be his unborn son. Can sperm be in your urine? It seemed plausible but as he had not had sex, or masturbated in...?...well, too long, it seemed not so likely. But what did he know about it? A screened funnel, a sliver of oak, and a specimen bottle does not a doctor make.
The first day he thought it was just food poisoning. The second day, with only two hours of severe pain, seemed an improvement and reaffirmed his food poisoning theory. The third day, with two separate pain sessions lasting multiple hours, he began to worry, and while not exactly hallucinating, his world view, small as it was inside the nearly finished 800 square foot renovated rental project, changed, and his vision became sharper and his sense of smell was registering every drop of mouse urine in the house. Later when he saw the mouse poke it's head up through a hole in the floor (holes a past renter had drilled to run extension cords or speaker wires), he threw a water bottle at it and then positioned a paint can over the hole. And cans of stain over three similar sized holes in other rooms. He made a mental note to plug the holes, as he should have done when he refinished the floors. On the fourth day, which started at 4 in the morning, for now his days were measured only by the onset of pain, he started to worry in earnest and began plotting out a trip to a doctor. By eight the pain had subsided enough that he thought he could drive without blacking out and crashing into a tobacco barn and he set off for the thirty mile drive south, the tobacco fields along the way showing mature crops with bottom leaves yellowing.
He signed in, and waited. There was a woman with a walker in the waiting room, who looked like Whitney Houston, and he wondered momentarily if she had indeed fallen this far. It made him sad to think so. After an hour the pain had come back and he prayed it would not come on full strength because he did not want to moan, or get on all fours, or lay on his back with legs up to his chest, or pace restlessly about the office, or perform any of the other unsuccessful pain management techniques he had tried over the last four days. He opted for an exaggeratedly upright posture with one fist clenched tightly on a rigid arm positioned slightly behind him on the seat. He kept his eyes averted and hoped the little Samoan boy with mother, father and grandmother in tow, would not engage him. The kid was all over the waiting room, pulling on pictures and rolling on the floor, generally seeming way too happy to be sick enough for a doctor's visit. The boy did start crying when his father carried him back to a doctor and the man unfairly took some pleasure in this.
His name was called after about an hour and he was elated but hoped his pants didn't fall down because he had unbuttoned them at some point in one of his attempts at relieving the pain. But it was just for temperature and blood pressure and basic questioning by nurses that he had been called back, and then he was sent out to the waiting room again. One of the questions was on the one to ten scale how would he rate the pain and misconstruing the meaning, thinking they meant relative to what he could conceive and not relative to what he had ever experienced, he said six. Over the next twenty minutes back in the waiting room he realized the more likely meaning of the question so when he eventually did see a doctor he said ten. Later, in the parking lot outside the pharmacist's office, while popping one non-narcotic and one narcotic pain killer, he remembered the time the top half of a faulty 24 foot extension ladder had broken free and slid in free fall to connect with his upright thumb, and amended the pain he felt now to a 9.5.
What the doctor had said was "welcome to the world of kidney stones."
View current page
...more recent posts