Most of my Friday nights as a 19-year-old evolved in comparable fashion: I’d deliver pizza until about nine and head home to shower off the tang of degradation before calling my friends and heading over to the local watering hole to spend all of my tip money on beer, nachos, and probably some more beer. Such was my life at that point and it served me just fine.
I was still deciding the future and was in no mood to disrupt my flow. The money was good, I was slothful, and I liked spending time with friends.
I think I started to feel different one Christmas at my grandmother’s house. I recall abruptly feeling a surge of demands that intimately resembled the charge to the last valued slices of my grandma’s rhubarb pie after the presents were opened. I had to go, badly, and rushed into the bathroom just in time to blow the porcelain lid to smithereens.
Within days, these surges became routine. I found myself racing to the toilet relentlessly, bowling over women and children on my way to pants-down, fist-clenching contrition for whatever blasphemous essence it was I consumed.
Questions flooded my head: was I eating something differently? Was it that shitty (pun moderately intended) powdered lemonade drink I liked? Were the preservatives playing fast and loose (pun absolutely intended) with my bowels?
I cut out the alleged evildoer and went about my merry way, but nothing changed. Days were peppered with more races to the restroom, culminating in mad dashes to the john that left me tempted to convert my entire trouser wardrobe to NBA-style tearaways. It wasn’t the damn powdered lemonade, it wasn’t anything.
It was getting worse, with traces of blood in my stool.
I didn’t have the internet to Google my symptoms and there were no half-sauced e-doctors I could sound out on behalf of my brushes with untimely release, so it was off to Dr. Cooper I went. I kicked my self for not going sooner.
After hearing the symptoms I was expressing to him fretfully and terribly as I sat in his office (sudden urges to “do number two,” fatigue, bleeding, abdominal pain, the feeling of never being “empty”), the Good Doctor sprang into action and ordered me through a volume of tests to figure out just what in the hell was going on.
Article comments
1 - Jeannie Danna
Jordan,
How honest your writing is and how straightforward! It took a ton of courage for you to write this essay about how our bodies betray us. I am blessed to have met you in my cyber-life as you are "really" helping me to tell my story to the world.
2 - Jordan Richardson
Thank you very much for reading!
3 - Christopher Rose
This was indeed a good article, both interesting and funny.
Changing the subject, what I want to know is what happened inbetween the taking of the photos above and on Jordan's "Aboot Me" page on his own site. Is there more to this Ulcerative Colitis than we've been told? ;-)
4 - roger nowosielski
So Jeannie,
You still haven't answered the question I posed to you days ago. I have a weird feeling that by nature, you tend to be elusive and somewhat on the coy side - I understand that. The question still stands, though - what made you write like a dream?
5 - Jordan Richardson
Chris, the operation has gone well and I spend a lot of time gazing at myself in the mirror.
:P
6 - Jeannie Danna
ROGER, WHAT THE F R U saying here? [You still haven't answered the question I posed to you days ago. I have a weird feeling that by nature, you tend to be elusive and somewhat on the coy side - I understand that. The question still stands, though - what made you write like a dream?]
7 - Jordan Richardson
He's using my article to ask you why/how you write so well, I think.
8 - Jeannie Danna
Jordan,
Where does everyone go? and how do they stick together like this? Do they e-mail each other?
9 - Jordan Richardson
Some of us do, yeah. It all depends. As for me, I just went outside for a second to enjoy the day and quickly remembered my seasonal allergies. Brilliant!
10 - Cindy
I go into sleep mode until I get an e-mail from Jordan telling me I should come back and blab some more. :-)
11 - Jordan Richardson
Any minute now...
:P
12 - Jeannie Danna
Are you all here? This is starting to get to me! I think I better take a break..and Cindy? I was over tweeting today and saw your @ replies I sent you a MSG it really is about a cat!