Willeford

A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided
The first nine pages

In hospital language a patient does not urinate, micturate, pee, piss, or take a leak. He voids. Or, as in my case, he is unable to void.
Hospital jargon is mid-Victorian. My hemorrhoids were not chopped out, hacked away, or operated upon. Instead, my asshole was dilated and debrided. There is no sex talk in a hospital either. Sex organs, male and female, when they are mentioned at all, are discussed formally, as elimination tools; nor is there, apparently, any distinction made between toilets for men and women. Whoever gets inside first has possession, and then there are no locks on the doors. If the doors were labeled, one suspects they would be called "Necessary Rooms," the euphemism for the toilets of our Gilded Age.
Several years ago, before I ever thought of entering a hospital, a friend told me that a nurse's aide would give a man a slow handjob for five bucks. Unsurprised at the time, I filed the information away, thinking I might be able to use it in a novel some day. I have been sorry since that I failed to press my friend for details. On the disinterested outside, I had no reason to disbelieve him. But on the inside, watching these harried, grimly smiling nurse's aides - probably the lowest I.Q. occupational group of employees in the nation - rushing about inefficiently, but earning every cent of their $2.40 an hour, I wondered vaguely how my friend had gone about getting his slow handjob. He would have had to draw them a picture. However, discounting the denseness of the nurse's aides' understanding, the lack of privacy, the hospital stench and the permeating reek of indignant death - these factors in combination - drove all thoughts of and about sex from my mind during the two weeks of my stay.
My friend, I believe, now, lied to me. On the morning they brought the old man into the four-bed ward to die, I was trying to void, straining slightly at irregular intervals, right hand holding my limp cock, my left holding the clammy metal "duck" beneath a covering sheet. And at ten a.m., when they brought the old man in to die, I had been engaged in this heroic project for about twelve hours. Three packs of cigarettes, six minutes for each three-cent cigarette, had gone up in smoke, and the pressure on my bladder was intolerable. Any moment I expected the distended membrane to burst inside me like a wickedly pricked balloon which, in turn, would bloat me terribly with uremic poisoning, sudden death, and a happy release at last from suffering. Such was my fervent hope. A filled bladder can, or at least has been known to, burst after only eight swollen hours. At the twelve-hour mark, I knew that I was literally tolerating the intolerable.
Placed in an intolerable situation a man amplifies every advantage, no matter how slight, searching his mind for any ideas that he can undredge to persuade himself that his predicament could be worse. For example, I had the four-bed ward to myself, and because the other three beds had been empty all night I had been able to whimper and sob noisily, and, for a lovely half-hour, shed some sincere tears over my plight without disturbing anyone or being sneered at by some bedridden stoical sonofabitch whose pain might conceivably be worse than my own. I did not believe then, nor do I now, that there could possibly be any pain worse than mine was at the time, except, perhaps, for another patient awaking immediately after a similar operation.
Some twenty hours before they brought the old man into the ward to die, my internal and external hemorrhoids had been lopped off. Unconscious during the operation, I had felt nothing. Despite the horrible stories told me by other victims of hemorrhoid amputation, the shot preceding the anesthetic had lulled me into the optimistic belief that I could put up with a little post-operative pain for a few minutes. What the hell? There were pain-killers like morphine they could give a man; right? And were there not drugs, new and wonderful, around nowadays I had never heard of that could do practically anything?
I was wrong and there were none. I woke up screaming.
My screams, in fact, awakened me. I was supine on a four-wheeled operating table in the Recovery Room ($15.00 extra rent on my hospital bill for the hour I spent in this pain-wracked room); the burning dingle between my buttocks was packed with gauze and taped over with adhesive, and there was a long length of rubber hose dangling from my rectum, with more tape wrapped about it at the base to hold it in place. The reason for so much exterior hose (about fourteen inches), I discovered two days later, was for my surgeon's grip: he wrapped the limber hose around his right hand and jerked it out!
The pain caused by this single cruelly calculated action was so excruciating that, if I had known how bad it would be in advance, I would never have had the operation. I also believe now, some two months later, that I would rather be dead, or still have the fourteen inches of hose dangling from my ass, instead of having it jerked out like that again. No choice could be simpler. Any person who dismisses "excruciating" as an exaggeration is either short on imagination or has well below the average of what sociologists call native American intelligence.
I will make this statement at once and at least once: if a man is past thirty, it is not worth his while to have a hemorrhoidectomy. I say this flatly and categorically because there are not, simply, enough good years remaining to any man past thirty to make the pain of this operation worth it. Moreover, any young man under thirty, especially young men who have relatively dim futures anyway, should realistically and judiciously examine his post-operative prospects before submitting his ass to the proctologist's knife.
"Good God!" I thought, between caterwauling screams, "Why won't someone help me? "
Spasmodically, and of its own volition, my violated, outraged anus clamped down again and again on this fucking hose, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I could do to prevent it. Wounded quickly, blood-raw from the razor-edged scalpel, each succeeding convulsive grip was worse than the last, until, between shuddering screams I reverted to the pleading baby-talk of a tortured, terrified child.
"Nursie! Nursie!" I cried. "Please help me! "
An old soldier, fifty years old, scarred from old war wounds, and here I was, reduced by the extremity of pain to using a word like "Nursie! " for God's sake. In front of a woman who did not care, I abased and humiliated myself. But I did not care at the time. Nor do I believe now, perspiring as I remember, that I could have done otherwise, even if I had known then, as I know now, that I was wasting my time. My expensive surgeon, who might have helped me, was either operating on some other poor bastard or having coffee and donuts in the Resident's Lounge.
Two other post-operative patients shared the small Recovery Room with me. They were not as persistent or as insistent as I was in their demands for help but they were by no means suffering in silence. One of them groaned gruffly at irregular intervals, and the other, a Cuban or Puerto Rican, reiterated the Spanish equivalent of our deep-throated Anglo-Saxon "Oh's!" - "Aie!" - "Aie! " - "Aie! " My Protestant bawl of pain, beginning with a long rattling "Ohhhhh" brought up from the diaphragm, is more satisfying than the quick-lipped two syllabled "Aie!" The latter, a broad "a" followed by the "ie" as a diphthong, sounds like one syllable to the uninitiated, but such is not the case. No matter how great the Latin's pain, there is always a definite glottal segue from the "Ahh" to "ee." Later on in the night I tried a few "Aie's" myself, but they sounded insincere, probably because the exclamation is made with the mouth and the lips instead of coming from the heart. I soon returned to the equally useless, but somehow richer, Anglo-Saxon "Ohhh!"
When the Recovery Room nurse finally got around to paying some attention to me she told me to shut up because I was disturbing the other patients. Keeping my eyes squeezed tight against the overhead light and the blinding pain, I rolled my head back and forth on the hard pillow. Perhaps she was busy doing things to and for the other patients, but she did nothing for me. A few minutes later she telephoned someone, telling whoever it was that she was snowed under in the Recovery Room and needed some assistance. Not long thereafter someone, perhaps the same nurse, shot a needle into my right tricep.
Almost immediately I got some relief.
The spasms were just as bad as before but they were now spaced about a minute apart, and the breather was long enough for me to quit hollering and to brace myself for the next involuntary clamp-down on the hose. That torturing clutch, however, when it came, was still bad enough to goose a yell out of me. But I no longer begged and wept for help.
For the rest of the day and well into the night the intervals between convulsive embraces lengthened. By the following morning the time- span between them was so long (a half-hour or more), and such an unhappy surprise when they came, that I would let out an astonished yelp each time, like a sleeping dog inadvertently stomped on in the dark.
Back in my ward and bed once more, I asked a candystriper to elevate my bed a little and to bring me a duck. To my surprise I could not void, but the desire was so great I kept the duck in the bed with me, deciding to try again in a few minutes. I was unaware of the long ordeal ahead.
Lunch arrived ("Low Residue Diet: No Pepper"). There was a bowl of vegetable soup, a roll with a pat of margarine, a small dish of applesauce, a broiled hamburger patty, and a small dish of strained spinach. One mouthful of the applesauce and I was finished. Nothing was wrong with the food, but I had no desire to eat. The reason for my loss of appetite was, of course, the knowledge that anything I ate would turn to excrement, and there was a day of reckoning ahead when I would have to pay my dues for every mouthful of food in the form of a scalding bowel movement. I lost a pound a day for fourteen days. At two p.m. an intern and a nurse came in and set up the rack to give me another pint of blood and a fifth of intravenous glucose and water. My bed movements were limited and I had to lie quietly on my right side for the three hours it took for all of this liquid to drip, a drop at a time, into my veins. This was my third pint of blood (Type 0+, $35.00 per pint). I had had two pints before the operation and was to get two more after this third pint in the days to follow.
Also, this was my second Miami hospital in four days' time. And, because it has some bearing on this narrative, I will explain the reason for the switch from a secular hospital to a Roman Catholic hospital.
I entered the secular hospital on a late Sunday afternoon, ate a huge dinner and, even though I was scheduled for the hemorrhoidectomy on Monday afternoon, slept well that night. The next morning, immediately after breakfast, I was wheelchaired to the X-Ray lab for a barium enema and X-Rays. I suspected that something was wrong with this procedure at the time. Five years before I had had a barium enema and X-Rays, and had not been allowed to eat the evening before or have breakfast in the morning. I had also been given a prescription for some chalky tasting castor oil to take as well. However, I didn't question the young girl who wheeled me out of this room; she wouldn't have known anything about it anyway. I had been losing blood steadily for more than a month. And
I was so weak and listless when I entered the hospital, finally, after weeks of importuning by my wife to "have the operation and get it over with, for Christ's sake," I could hardly think at all.
The barium enema alone is a nasty bit of business. One must somehow retain all this white gooey stuff in the lower intestine until the fluoroscoping is finished and X-Ray plates are snapped. I managed, barely, and then, weak and trembling, I was led down the hall by a Cuban lab technician to a toilet where I could, at last, squirt out the white fluid. I did, and promptly passed out, sagging dreamlike to the cold concrete floor. The technician found me on the floor, broke an ammonia capsule ($.30 on my hospital bill) under my nose to bring me around, and took me back to the X-Ray room. He told me to lie down on the freezing metal table again, which I did, thinking he meant for me to rest there for a few minutes before being wheeled back to my room. But I observed him as he mixed up another batch of white powder and water and realized, or suspected, that this might be for me.
"That isn't for me, is it?" I asked, smiling weakly.
He nodded. "The X-Rays didn't come out. We've got to take them again."