Describing the Pain

Saturday March 6, 2010
Again the day starts at 2:30AM, following about 5 hours of sleep in fits and starts. Visiting with Rex yesterday afternoon on Skype and our conversation turned to analysis of my discomfort. Rex doggedly probed for details on my exact condition. So came up the matter of bladders and sphincters.
As with all of things, my situation leads to an endless parade of consequences, for the most part of the unintended variety. I remember when I had my rotator cuff surgery how for the first time in my life I had to face the reality of how heavy my arm was. You know, if I could weigh my limbs individually and realize how much I’m throwing around and knowing how little of my muscle is doing all the work I would have to forget the numbers, because it wears my ass out just thinking about it. Let’s face it, moving is a lot of work. Now in the matter at hand, yesterday to explain to Rex I took a third person view of my calamity. Remembering Dr. E saying the bladder has a mind of its own, I described to him an invisible baker decorating a cake, and in his one hand he gripped mightily a bag (which we will call a bladder) full of icing and in the other hand he gripped the soft yet pliable member, the nozzle connected to the bladder. With one he provided power to move the product, with the other he controlled flow and put the product where he wanted it.
In my case my bladder has been violated and cut on. When water reaches a certain level my invisible baker squeezes down on the bladder, get that wet crap away from me. At the same time my sphincter, trained by a Funk and Wagnall dictionary dropped on my head repeatedly whenever I failed to make it to the appropriate facility at a very young age. I always marveled at the book, with it’s cushy cover and thin pages, how could anything leave a pain in the head for so long and not a mark. Anyway, the point is the sphincter is operating on a basic behavior level that it was long ago conditioned to operate on. So the sphincter is as if the invisible bakers hand gripping the nozzle was possessed by some extremely evil entity that gave it super strength to grip down and close the nozzle, even as the invisible baker was applying ever more pressure, oh, he rests, oh, there he goes again. Rex then lit up with the glow of total comprehension, and we laughed until the tears rolled at my sorry ass situation.