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My Life with Hemorrhoids
Thursday, October 14th, 2010
This will be funny, I promise.
Several weeks ago I woke up with hemorrhoids. I didn’t know I had them, but I knew something was wrong because I had an uncomfortable feeling where, well, the place where hemorrhoids like to crop up. So I did the only thing any self-respecting male does when he knows he needs the doctor: I ignored the problem.
And, of course, I had a lot of good reasons for not visiting the doctor too:
- I didn’t have a health card at the time
- I don’t have a car
- I’m afraid of having things shoved up my butt
So I waited till my discomfort turned into a sensation, my sensation turned into a pain, and then my pain turned into a really big problem. I became constipated and whenever I managed to do my business, I left blood behind in the toilet.
After several days of this torture, I finally confided in a friend who urged me to see a doctor. I told him I couldn’t for the above reasons, and he understood, so he directed me to Telehealth instead.
Telehealth (1-866-797-0007) is a wonderful medical service available to every resident of Ontario—and to their health card-less friends. You just pick up your phone wherever you are and call them.
It’s the doctor-o-phobe’s dream come true, because you have free access to Registered Nurses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can consult them about your deepest pains without fear of getting jabbed with a needle, being forced to wear a mini-skirt-type nightie, or having something unpleasant shoved where you don’t want it.
It’s also the nurses’ dream come true because you can’t see them. Normally to relieve tension in a doctor’s office, nurses will pull faces and thumb their noses at you after they’ve closed the waiting room door. Now they can do all this while still talking to you—and you’ll never even know.
Anyway, so I worked up the nerve to call Telehealth and after a long period of listening to elevator music, a nurse came on the line and asked me what was wrong.
I tried to explain my situation, but I was at a loss for words. How does a guy explain that he has all the symptoms of womanhood—feeling cranky and kind of sore, and bleeding in the nether regions—without coming across as a total weirdo? So I hedged my bets and made up a lot of things that sounded like manly pains. However, my nurse was not to be denied her right to help me uncover my feminine side, so she hounded me until I told her the truth.
The nurse made little sympathetic noises and hmmed in all the right places, but I could tell she was more interested in measuring the problem than fixing it. Our conversation went something like this:
Her: So, tell me (sympathetic noise), what’s really the problem?
Me: I’m bleeding from my butt.
Her: Hmm. Yes, but how much?
Me: Does it really matter? I’m bleeding.
Her: So, you’re bleeding right now? (bigger sympathetic noise)
Me: Yes. I’m positive I’m bleeding.
Her: Well, if you were to blot it, would the stain be the size of a Loonie or Twoonie?
Me: I’m not sure. I didn’t have any change handy while I was trying to KEEP MYSELF FROM BLEEDING TO DEATH!
And on and on the conversation went, me trying to tell her how important not dying is to me, and her trying to measure the quantity of my blood loss by increasing denominations of money.
And, finally, after she satisfied her morbid curiosity, the nurse gave out her verdict: hemorrhoids.
I was shocked and dropped the phone. At that point I had no idea what hemorrhoids actually were, but judging from the name, they sounded like a terrible parasite one gets from eating the radioactive sludge served in cafeterias.
Apparently I wasn’t far wrong. Hemorrhoids are little bulges in the veins around the rectum (so my nurse cheerfully told me over the phone) that are caused by straining due to constipation. People suffer from this lovely condition because they don’t get enough fibre in their diets, don’t drink enough water, and eat fatty processed foods.
However, said my nurse, even though I’d probably brought this plague on myself by deep-fried gluttony, and though I was probably one of those thousands of other weak and out-of-shape young men who can’t do five push-ups, I was not to be worried because misery loves company: currently three out of every four people in the world are afflicted with this problem. Furthermore, most cases are easily treated by bathing the infected area in hot salt-water and becoming more health conscious.
After hanging up on the nurse, I promptly forgot half of what she told me to do. The part I did remember was that she told me not to panic. And of course, I didn’t listen to her advice because I was too busy panicking about the other information I’d forgotten.
I didn’t want to look like an idiot by calling her back for the same info, so I decided to browse the internet instead. To keep from being misled by quack info—you can’t trust everything online—I performed an intense and rigorous screening process: I typed “hemorrhoid” into Google and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.
Of the 418,000 results I could have got, I ended up with hemorrhoidshemorrhoids.com, which was a lucky find because it looked pretty official. The site home page was covered in pictures of smiling women wearing bikini tops and holding plates of vegetables or training weights. What these women had to do with hemorrhoids or hemorrhoid treatment I don’t know, but they looked like they were happy and not bleeding, so I thought it was worth investigating what worked for them.
Apparently what worked for them is being attractive and athletic women in their early twenties who exercise in their sleep and don’t eat anything they can’t drink; which is to say, the site refused to comment on the ladies at all, choosing instead to hock a number of Preparation H type creams that may or may not cause your insides to burst into flames. But don’t worry, the website assured me with calculated cheerfulness, “We test the products on volunteers, so you'll know how good they are.”
I was ready to leave before I got slotted as the next volunteer, when my eye caught the following heading: “Napoleon Bonaparte and his fight with Hemorrhoids”. According to the article below it, our friend Napoleon could have won the battle at Waterloo if he’d attacked earlier in the day, but the poor guy didn’t because he was taking a bath to relieve his hemorrhoidal itch. As nice as it was to know Napoleon’s lower intestinal pain had become someone’s historical trivia, I was still angry that this did nothing to solve my immediate problem.
The thing you have to understand about hemorrhoids is that they are a very personal matter. Every case is different. A person can have them internally or externally; they can bleed and itch or not cause any pain at all. Thus it is hardly comforting to know that someone else has them, because after all, THEY DON’T HAVE YOURS AND EVEN IF THEY DID THEIRS NEVER FELT LIKE GOLFBALLS SHOVED UP THEIR HINDQUARTERS AND GIVEN A TWIST TO MAKE SURE THEY’RE SNUG!
Still, while I was kind of mad at Napoleon for hogging my claim to hemorrhoidal fame, his defeat reminded me that I was supposed to bathe in hot salt water. Unfortunately, I currently live at a camp in a dorm-styled building. In my dorm are a number of showers, toilets, and sinks, but—you guessed it—no bathtub. Having now reached the point of fevered lunacy, I decided to improvise.
Set into the wall in a corner of the dorm washroom is a standard workshop sink. It is roughly two and a half feet wide and two feet deep. The beastly thing stands on cast iron legs about three feet off the ground and is surrounded on all sides by tile, which when wet, is as cold as ice and just as difficult to get a grip on. After a ridiculous amount of heaving and shouting and bruising, I eventually found myself high off the ground, naked, performing major feats of contortionism to keep some of my 6’2” self inside this sink, in order to boil the tiniest portion of my body in three inches of salty water, while the rest of me shivered like the dickens. Twenty minutes passed before I realized I had to get down the way I came up. And the floor tiles were wet.
I will leave it to you to imagine the further indignities I tried before giving up and deciding to live healthier. Two weeks after I did, my hemorrhoids disappeared.
Here’s the point: in addition to having nothing better to do than tell you the gory details of my life with hemorrhoids, I was a complete idiot. It’s super easy to avoid this problem—“No strain no pain”—but I didn’t, because I was a stupid goober and hung around my computer for most of the day. I wasn’t active, so I didn’t drink water. And instead of being choosy, I ate whatever would fit in my mouth. All of this led to my constipation, and in turn, hemorrhoids.
Then, when I knew something was wrong, I waited too long to call a doctor because I was embarrassed. And after that, I still took awhile to decide to be proactive about keeping my body in shape. If I had looked after myself sooner, I would never have been in so much pain and I wouldn’t have had to go through this stupid ordeal in the first place.
So, listen up: hemorrhoids can happen to anyone. Nearly all of them can be prevented by minimal healthy living. All you have to do is a walk a little every day, eat fresh vegetables and fruit, and drink water. If you do get them and they don’t go away, you don’t have to be scared about calling the doctor. Research shows that 95% of them are treated without surgery, and the most routine solution involves placing a little cream on trouble areas.
Again, I can’t recommend enough the importance of staying healthy now. Prevention still is the best cure, especially if it keeps you from becoming hemorroidal-historical trivia on somebody else’s website, or in my case, the newspaper.
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