Solid, well-formed, no cramping or blood.
No, not really. Wet, crampy, and barely-controlled, of course.
This is the final entry in my log of bm’s. It’d be more accurate if I stopped it post-surgery, since I won’t in fact have another bowel movement for months, if ever again. But I’ve settled into a pretty predictable pattern, and there doesn’t seem to be any benefit left to doing these entries. Plus there’s the math: it takes me between 2 and 5 minutes for every post, averaging about 16 bm-categorized posts per day, with 7 days remaining till surgery. That’s between 224 and 560 minutes spent not obsessing about shit…or very roughly 3-9 hours.
I remember there being something very satisfying to sitting down and, after a few minutes of relaxed waiting, completely emptying one’s bowel with the emission of a long, solid log. For awhile, I thought of it as a loss: I will never have a satisfying shit again. And isn’t that always the way? You don’t get a chance to see the last one…it’s always a memory. It’s never, “this is the last time I’ll run a mile,” or, “I’ll never see her again after today.” Time goes by, and it slowly dawns on you that, whenever the last one was, it went by without fanfare, unnoticed.
Disease sends one deep into such profound realization. Then you get yanked back to reality, where the choices are holding on to today’s misery or letting the equilibrium of “normal” settle in a different place than you remember. It may be silly to have ever mourned my last, forgotten solid poo, but it would be sillier still for me to consider holding out longer just to get it back.
Truth be told, I’m so sick of waste coming out my ass, I’m still very hesitant about trying a J-pouch. Fortunately, the end ileostomy with retained rectum will allow me as many months as I want to opt in or out of that choice.
On a different note, I realized today that, as optimistic as I may sound about the future, there’s some grieving that needs to happen about the past. Compared with the past year, the future does, indeed look bright; there’s nothing to grieve, really, unless it’s lost opportunity. Still, in order to completely embrace my differently-routed future, I’ll need to take some time to look back on what I was before this endless flare-up, and perhaps even before ulcerative colitis, shed a few gulping-for-air tears, and say goodbye.
I’ve been on the verge a few times, so it should come any day now. Sweet release.
