I’ve had stomach problems my entire life.
When I was little I was rushed to the ER on multiple occassions, only to have the doctor stick his thumb up my butt and say “she needs to poo!” It was traumatizing.
Recently though, it’s starting to get worse, or I’m just starting to get sick of it. Either way, the doctor has ordered a bunch of tests, and one of them just happens to be a stool test. So yesterday at the doctor, the nurse hands me a fucking package and says to follow the directions carefully and that the sample can be mailed or dropped off.Mailed? Huh? I spent the whole day wondering which was worse, carrying a bag of my own shit to the office or going to the USPS and mailing a bag of my own shit. Both sound pretty shitty to me. It wasn’t until I got home and read the directions that I realized exactly what all of this entails. This is no regular stool sample, this is going to take some serious work on my part:
- I cannot eat meat for three days before I start collecting.
- I cannot eat beets or take vitamins.
- I can’t take Ibuprofen.
- This collection is not just from one day’s poo. Oh no, that would be to easy. For accurate results, the poo has to be collected from three different days, which means the poo from day one and the poo from day two are going to sit somewhere in my apartment until I am ready to mail them all together.
- The poo has to be sent over in a slide in order to ‘preserve’ it. Lucky for me, the kit provides me with three sticks in order to accurately wipe the specimen on the correct part of the slide. So this means I can’t just shit in a cup and drop it off, I actually have to handle my own poo.
And suddenly, the whole mailing aspect of it all seems kind of awesome.
