Keep This One on The Down Low

I’m hoping someone in the medical profession or over the age of sixty can answer a question for me. Why do elderly folks talk so much about their bowels? Often. In public. At length. With people they don’t even know. I hear it all of the time when I’m around seasoned citizens, especially in the doctor’s office. I’m not the most modest person in the world. Heck, we haven’t shut a bathroom door at our house since 1994, but there are some things I don’t talk about much, and irregularity is one of them. I file that in the same category as those conversations that start with, “Does this look inflamed to you?” While I have extolled the virtues of a daily dose of ground flax seed to close friends, I generally refrain from talking about the habits of my colon. And trust me, as someone whose nerves are connected directly to her colon, I could talk for days about it IF I wanted to. Which I don’t. Especially not with strangers.

My mother talks about it all of the time. Granted, she’s a retired nurse. In fact, the times she babysat Teen Angel as a baby, I came home to notes where she had charted Teen Angel’s eating and bathroom activities for the day. You can take the nurse out of the hospital, but you can’t take the hospital out of the nurse. She’s been charting other people’s “output” for years, so I guess it’s only natural she would talk about her own, but Mama J. does it, too. There isn’t a day that goes by that Mama J. doesn’t mention it. It’s an obsession with that woman, and I’ll thank the three people from my church who read this website not to rat me out to her that I posted this on the World Wide Web because I’m about to go where I shouldn’t but simply can’t stop myself.

This week, her sluggish system has been hangin’ in like Gunga Din, and she resorted to a bottle of some kind of cleansing something or other. The dosage was supposed to be one-fourth of a bottle, and sticking to the Hula-gen theory that if one pill is good, three will be better, she drank the whole bottle. To put it delicately, this resulted in something I have dubbed Sh*tty Sh*tty Bang Bang. She has not left the house in twenty-four hours. In fact, she cancelled her manicure appointment, which she NEVER does. She could have one foot in the grave, and she would drag herself to the beauty shop for nails and a wash and set. Not today, brothers and sisters. She stayed home. She is colonoscopy ready, and she has shared with us each and every detail of this experience. I’m sharing some of it with you because I want someone to tell me why there is a compulsion to share this information about yourself when you reach the golden years. I am scratching my head over this. And honestly, I’m giggling a little. Well, a lot. I’m giggling a lot, because she ignored Hubby’s warnings to go easy on that cleanser. And I’m making a pact with Hubby that when we get old and I start talking ad nauseam about my bowels, (Get it? Ad nauseam?) he’s allowed to whack me over the head with a bottle of Miralax.