Monthly Archives: April 2015

Defying Death…

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So, Easter morning, I thought the grim reaper was knocking on my door! Funny the things that roll through your mind during frightful times. All I could think about was conversations I’ve had with my mother in recent months.

You see, she lives in a retirement village, so the headcount get’s smaller pretty much every day as someone totally retires! She told me that one of the old farts playing bridge excused himself from the table saying he had to go to the bathroom. When he never came back, they went to check on him and sure enough, there he was, dead as a fucking doorknob, sitting on the toilet. She said that happens quite often because when you’re having a heart attack sometimes it feels like you have to take a crap.

Well, my 83-year-old mom always gets dressed up, wears makeup and makes her hair look good whenever she goes out, even if it’s just to get groceries. Many times, people ask her why she’s so dressed up? I thought, well there’s your perfect answer now. All you have to say is, ‘well, you never know when you’re going to have to go to the “BATHROOM”!  We joked about it and I told her that’s why, because you live alone, you should at least carry a tube of lipstick in your housecoat at night, you know, just in case, because I know that she would want to look good going ‘OUT’ out!

So anyway, Easter morning around 1 am, I wake up because I’m pretty uncomfortable, my chest hurts, and the little hairy dog we have, who looks like a cross between an opossum and a squirrel, needs to go out to pee. I leave my warm comfy bed, go downstairs, let the dog out and wait for him to finish his business because, leaving him out there on his own means there’s a possibility he may recreate with the possum who visits our yard nightly.  The whole time I’m standing there, my heart is thump thumping like a son of a bitch, like a drummer who just discovered one extra beat and who was willing to throw it into his normal repertoir every chance he could.

Once the little bugger is back inside safe and sound, I think, if I’m feeling so awful and I’m going to kack (die), I don’t want to know, so I head off to the guest room to go back to bed. I’d rather die in my sleep than know that I’m headed to the other side.

Well, that didn’t pan out because aside from the thump thumping, my head felt like it was going to explode and I suddenly had the urge to take a huge crap, and I’m thinking, FUCK…THIS IS IT, and my makeup is all upstairs. I’m gonna die sitting on the toiletin the worst bathroom in my entire house, looking like Medusa because I was too fucking lazy the day before to blow-dry my hair and it looks like this twisted, unkempt, pile of tangled bullshit spewing every which way just like those snakes writhing around on her head. And the worst part being, I had washed my face before I went to bed and had no makeup on AND I forgot to moisturize! Pfft…

The whole time, I’m thinking, there’s things you need to wrap up girl before you go so me being me, I dashed to my computer, opened a new word document and I wrote a long goodbye letter to my children and the hubby. I cried while I wrote it and then I laughed at the end because I have 3 unpublished books sitting on the desktop of my computer, and by God, I needed them to get published in the event of my demise. So I make a bullet list of how to do it, gave them all my passwords and sign in information, and if they were too inept to figure it out, I also gave them the name of someone, another author I trust, who they could just send everything to so he could take care of it. My thinking is that, if my body is not going to be around, I want all the things on my mind to stay here forever! Whatever!

Once I was satisfied with all that business, I went upstairs, which of course made the thump thumping even worse, but I persevered and made it into the shower. After that, I got my makeup out, took a good look at myself in the mirror trying to decide how I wanted to look in the afterlife. Should I gob the makeup on as though I was going for a photo shoot, or did I want to look soft like an angel, like you’d want to sit there for hours upon hours rubbing my dumb old dead cheek because you couldn’t resist because of how angelic I looked?

The deciding factor came in an instant when my sphincter muscle relaxed and fired off a warning shot!

Holy crap! I mean, no, really, holy crap!

If I shit, I might just die and so my brain, as it always does, does that weird theatrical thing and I start looking at where the toilet is and how, if I take a crap, and if I die on it, how can I position myself so that I look good for those gorgeous paramedics I see almost daily at the little hospital house next door.  No way in hell do I want them to find me covered in my own shit, with messy hair and no makeup on, in some stupid looking pile on the floor. I’ve worked way too hard up to this point to keep my body in good shape to let that just slide by unnoticed…NO WAY!

Hell, if I was going to be laying there dead, I wanted them to be able to go back to the fire station after all was said and done, and sit around talking about what a great rack I had and how pretty I looked at the time of death!

Well, that warning shot was all I needed as motivation to get a move on.

No FUCKING way I was going to sit on that toilet until my makeup was finished (I took the angelic route), until I was dressed and ready to go to the hospital, and until I had figured out how to stage a more beautiful death scene! So, I did what I had to. I squeezed my butt checks together, even though their protest was trying to get the better of me. I am very perseverant when I want to be and when my sphincter tried to pull another fast one, I just squeezed harder!

I. WAS. STILL, WINNING!

It was now about 7 am and being the nice person I am, I thought, okay, 7 am is a reasonable time to wake the hubby. I went back downstairs, got him a cup of coffee, came back up to the bedroom and sat on the bed next to him and watched as he took a few sips of that beautiful Sumatra I brew daily.

When he looked at me fully dressed, makeup on, hair tamed beneath my favorite baseball cap, looking like a deer caught in the headlights of a car, he said, ‘are you okay, what’s wrong?’

Me, very casually because I don’t want to panic him because I know it will panic me, I say, ‘I think something is wrong. My heart feels funny and it’s hard to breathe and my head feels like it’s going to explode. I think I need to go to the emergency room, now.’

Well, if that doesn’t make a man move at the speed of light, nothing will! His morning boner shriveled up into frightened turtle mode and he jumped out of bed, got dressed and we were off and running to the neighborhood hospital.

Flash forward!

Several hours later, dozens of tests later, it appears I am going to live! Every test came back proving that I’m fit as a fiddle, that my heart was just prematurely ejaculating or something, which raised my blood pressure to critical mode, and that it was n.o.t.h.i.n.g to worry about. The doctor explained that many people go through this, sometimes on a daily basis, and that I needed no further treatment!

Hearing this information and seeing the monitor next to me, which showed my blood pressure had returned to normal without any intervention, I asked them if they could unhook some things so I could use the restroom! Finally, I could go with confidence! Hell…I was in the hospital so, even if I did kack on the toilet, they’d be able to paddle the rest of the crap out of me and save my life at the same time.

I am truly grateful that I am still here to tell this tale.

The only thing that saddens me is that I made all my sisters, who are on Facebook and saw the stupid picture that the hubby took of me, lying on the hospital bed with all those tubes running out of me, (after he promised he would not post it posted it anyway) I made them promise not to tell Mom because I don’t want her to worry about me…ever, and the sadness comes from the fact that she would so totally laugh her ass off because of our former conversations about dying on the toilet!

Maybe one day I’ll bring it up, but for now, I’m just going to live happily ever after!