'Roid Rage, or "The Red Scare"
Up until now, Heather's been pretty lucky in terms of pregnancy symptoms. And Heather's really good natured about the negative aspects of pregnancy. But there is one symptom that she's been afraid of since day one, a symptom so horrible that -
Well, maybe it'll be easier if I describe it in song...
(to the tune of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer)
You've heard 'bout rashes and flashes and hard-to-make-shitties
Varicose blueness and real tender titties...
But do you recall...?
The most heinous symptom of all?
Sometimes inside your rectum
Arteries can get enlarged
And if an abcess ruptures
Some mucous may be discharged.
'Cause when your veins get swollen
There's more blood flow than you need.
And then the slightest pressure
Can make your swollen rectum bleed!
So if you sit down to poo
Check after you wipe.
Get protrusions diagnosed
Your hemorrhoids may have thrombosed.
Some women don't feel sexy
When their rectum struggles free.
Don't fear, they can be treated
Suppositorily!
Flash back to about 5 days ago. Heather was moping around the house, looking furtive and ashamed. I didn't think much of this behavior, because we hadn't gone grocery shopping for over a day, so I assumed she was feeling guilty about some desperate pregnancy snacking behavior, like eating an ice cream cone filled with mustard.
But when I sat down for lunch, she cornered me at the table with a wild look in her eyes. I knew that this was about more than sneaking a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise right out of the container. This was big.
Here is a transcript of our conversation, as I remember it.
Heather: I have something terrible to tell you. You can't tell anyone!
John: Okay. What's wrong, baby?
Heather: I think I might have hemor.....
John: What?
Heather: You know!
John: (nodding) Ohh... (thoughtful pause) What?
Heather: (leans over and whispers)
John: (taking Heather's hand gently) Okay. Let's stay calm. What makes you think you have hem-
Heather: Don't say it out loud! (her eyes narrow suspiciously as she looks downward) They may be listening.
John: Okay, what should we call... "them"? How about... "fancy hole"!
Heather: I hate you.
John: (quietly) How do you know that you have this... fanciness?
Heather: There was... evidence. When I was... um... wiping.
John: When was the last time you ate beets?
Now, perhaps you think that last thing was a rather odd thing to say. Perhaps you don't understand a fucking thing about how my marriage works.
I do not like beets. In my opinion, they taste disgusting, they have a texture remniscent of overcooked caterpillar, and they have a terrible habit of making your morning bowel movement look like a deleted scene from The Exorcist. Heather, on the other hand, loves beets, and eats them all the time.
Now, purely in the interest of statistical analysis, let's look at the cases of "something somebody thought might be life threatening backdoor bleeding, but turned out to be nothing" over the course of my marriage to this point:
| John (no beets) | Heather (beets) |
| 0 | 2 |
So I had some reason to ask this question. Which is why Heather responded:
Heather: Of course I ate motherfucking beets and they don't have a goddamned cocksucking rubber-sheathed shit to do with this! Now stop dicking around and help me!!!
Even though it may not seem totally rational at first blush, this too was justified. Let's go to the stats:
| Number of life-threateningly retarded actions over the course of 5 year relationship | |
| John (no brain) | Heather (brain) |
| 36,432,321 | 0 |
If you think that I might be estimating high to get into Heather's good graces, you weren't there when I was driving cross-country with Heather while eating carrots, and saw a pig, and decided to make a hilarious pig noise, causing the partially chewed carrot bits to become lodged in my sinuses, causing me to sneeze and blow snot-covered carrot bits all over the inside of the windshield, causing us to suddenly have no visibility while flying down a busy highway at 75 miles per hour.
This really happened. Ask Heather.
Anyway, Heather's insistence that this was a real problem convinced me that we needed to take this problem seriously and take definitive action. But I had never faced a crisis of this magnitude before. That's when I turned to my crisis-management role-model: Tom Ridge.
I immediately devised a convenient system wherein Heather could signal to me the severity of her hemorrhoids fancy hole at any given moment. Different levels of severity would be described by different savory spices, going from Saffron (mild, painless bleeding) through Cumin (itching) all the way to Cinnamon (fully thrombosed).
This spice-based system (code-named Poopourri), has already been adopted by DARPA.
But Heather, always the Democrat, felt like a meaningless rating system wasn't enough. She wanted to know if we should call our midwives.
My response was that we should maybe wait for a day, and see if it clears up. Of course, this is my response to all medical issues, so it's hard to take that response seriously. If my abdomen suddenly swelled, burst, and millions of football-sized spiders came streaming out, I would tell Heather, "Let's wait a day and see if it clears up."
But at this point, Heather was panicked and deranged enough to actually take my advice, so we moved on to the question of how to guarantee that no one, ever, would discover her terrible secret. She said that nobody could know, because if they did, every time anyone spoke to her they would, quote: "assume that I was bleeding out of my asshole at that very minute."
I make that assumption about everyone anyway, for recreational purposes, so I didn't see what the big deal was.
My suggestion was that she tell everyone about it, and kinda make a joke about it. Maybe in some big public forum, like a blog. If you make fun of yourself, I argued, you preempt anyone else's attempt to make fun of you.
Heather's argument was, if you put this in your blog, you'll wake up with significantly fewer testicles than the quantity to which you have grown accustomed.
I was duly persuaded. So I promised to never reveal her - no, OUR - secret. Because we are partners in this pregnancy, and if Heather wants to keep a part of this shared, sacred experience private, I will respect that.
Beets 3, Heather 0.