I Spend a Lot of Time Thinking About Shit

Actual shit, not a metaphor or synonym, but actual excrement and other bodily fluids and excretions, but mostly, straight up: Shit.

I’m responsible for making sure all the shit in my house moves along the way it should, with proper consistency, color, odor and so on. I’m a little bit of a shit expert. I’m a shitspert.

I’m a shit regulator. The family shitulator.

Shit Watch #1: Mom’d always struggled with being regular. I remember as a kid we had, and needed two bathrooms. A good shit required a good sit: coffee, the newspaper, and time alone. Now that she doesn’t move much, it takes more than that.

Shit Fact#1: Regular movement keeps your movements regular

Poor Sad Kevin Eileen was full of shit

Shit watch #2: Poor Sad Kevin Eileen, our old cat, has megacolon, which I knew nothing about until we got him. They said he was healthy; it turned out that they, as well as he, were full of shit. I mean full. He had to have three enemas and for a while I experimented with Miralax and extra fiber (via mascerated lentils) until his constipation turned into little Kevin Hershey Shit Kisses being left all over. I covered everything with washable cat blankets. The thing is, his rectal muscles are so damaged he can neither push anything out, nor hold anything in, so finding the right mixture, became a throwback to those high school days when I imagined myself a chemist, looking for just the right mix of this and that to get me where I wanted to go, stoned-wise. Kevin is now on a special expensive diet and we’ve been blessed with large, fluffy, very smelly poops the size of Cuban cigars. He has upcycled the special Kevin blankets into sex toys. His, not mine.

Poor Sad Kevin Eileen the Cat

Shit Watch #3: Paisan, Mom’s large black cat had to get enema’s pretty regularly to stay regular when he lived with her. He was the originator of the overcooked mashed lentils remedy once he came to live with me. It worked, but man, if he pooped in the middle of the night it woke me up. I didn’t know it was a thing, getting woken up by a smell.

Shit Fact#2: Know Your Fiber - One makes you poop. The other makes you stop.

Shit Watch #4: For a few years I suffered with severe ulcerative colitis (UC)- a very sexy disease full of bloody shit and the inability to keep said bloody shit in. Like that time they neglected to tell me the radioactive solution I’d had to drink for a colon scan was also a laxative. I became “aware” of that in front of a very fancy liveried McDonalds on East 57th Street. It would have been a little less traumatic/humiliating had it been the Mickey Ds on 8th Avenue and 35th Street peopled mostly by homeless methadone addicts and junkies because that one doesn’t have a doorman.

It’s not like I’m the only one who has publicly shit themselves, Anna Pulley wrote about it recently. Also, I’m sober a long time and if you’re sober long enough you’ve heard a lot of people talk about peeing and shitting themselves. It’s what we do, drunks, I mean. Shitty, pissy drunks.¹ I thought bleeding from my ass was just a thing that drunks do. It’s not by the way. You can bleed from your ass and never have had a drink and you can be a raging wet-brain alcoholic and never worry about bloody underpants.

The good thing about having had to regulate my own shittiness, was by the time Mom came along and I needed to keep an eye on her pee and poop, I’d already had first hand experience with who made the best pull-ups. It’s TENA, hands down (not an affiliate link, just a passing the knowledge). I’m on meds for life now, so back to regular, cute, blood-free big girl panties, thanks for asking.

My shit-centric life started before Mom, the cats, or even the UC. My high school bestie’s mother was one of those homemakers who noticed if you changed the angle of pen on her desk. The place was spotless, a living room not made for living at all, and wall-to-wall carpeting. It was in thier apartment that I left the poop to end all poops. A poop so big it would not even entertain the possibility of being flushed, but preferred to stay stuck and worshipped as the water rose. And rose. And overflowed onto the wall-to-wall carpeting.

Word to the wise, bathrooms should not be carpeted.

Also, teach your children about shut-off valves, ballcocks (a word that is just plain fun to use in conversation) and the like. It’s a basic life lesson that’ll serve them well and could’ve saved me from the trauma that prevented me from being able to shit anywhere outside my own home for almost forty years.

The Spruce / Theresa Chiechi

Shitty conversations: As a teenager, I remember telling my mother, “You know life is over once you and your friends starting talking about your bowel movements as if that was acceptable conversation.”

And then, you get to that age….

While still living in assisted living, Mom broke her back. I don’t remember what it was that made her say “I bet you never thought you’d be doing this,” but it was probably just the round-the-clock care and spoon feeding her because she’s couldn’t sit up to eat. She was in a lot of pain and needed narcotic pain-killers. Opiates constipate you - Vicodin, Morphine, Oxycodone, Tylenol #3, All the fun ones. Ask any junkie (I can introduce you if you don’t have one of your own).

She was in no condition to sit on the toilet with coffee and a newspaper. I added Colace (stool softner), Milk of Magnesia, Senna and more. Nothing. I rolled her over, snapped on the gloves, plucked a single glycerin suppository out of the container. “You know Mom, speaking of things I never thought I’d be doing…”

The thing about playing chemist, sometimes there are explosions. There was an explosion.

Since she’s come to live with me, I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the formula; sometimes her stool had gotten so rock hard she was in tears. I’d caught her digging “it” out and not telling me. We cut her nails down to short short so she wouldn’t hurt herself and also, shorter nails meant less room for shit to get embedded under her nails. I have a hypersensitive sense of smell. It’s my super power. I can literally smell when you have a stuffed nose or a sinus infection. I can tell the ingredients in most food. I could be a cancer sniffing dog in my next life. And I can smell a single, invisible molecule of poop embedded under an old lady’s coral-colored fingernail.

Now that the dementia has progresssed and she’s not moving around much or eating solids, much like Poor Sad Kevin Eileen, Mom is not able to push anything out, or hold anything in. We depend on gravity, peristalsis and self-awareness.

Peristalsis moving what appears to be a yellowed ping pong ball along

The ideal situation has things moving regularly and her able to make it to the bathroom, but life is never, by definition, ideal, i.e. existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality. I keep a bathmat in the space in front of the commode, just in a case.

Ma, after getting the good shit

That’s Some Good Shit: We’ve pretty much got the Mom shit combination down to mornings of Miralax and stewed prunes, which I pass off as chocolate pudding. Most of the time it works perfectly and we’ve got an every other day deposit. Then sometimes it's, well…two days ago it was three times in one day, with one of those times lasting 45 minutes on the commode and a commode almost overflowing with poop and paper and wipes.

The commode was on full, but Mom was not yet on empty.

As I got her up. a tiny piece of very soft shit dropped out of her flat little tushie and hit the bathmat and as old and shabby as it was, I was suddenly very much in love with and grateful for it. I cleaned Mom up, got her in fresh pull ups and into bed and promptly stepped, barefoot, into the small little wet shit on the bathmat.

The shitty bathmat went into the garbage (it was time anyway), and I hopped into the bathroom to wash my foot off. Mom slept through the night. The following morning, I tweaked the Miralax/Prune combo, yet again, and I am now in the market for a new small bathmat.

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1. Credit due to the beloved late Phil Parker for this phrase