Category: Writing

Bowel watch

I took the dog out for a walk this morning. He heard me rattling his harness and bolted up and down the hallway, filled with a childlike excitement that always leaves me ashamed for the number of times I fail to take him out for a walk.

With harness in hand it took me several minutes to get the thing on. The dog hates to have things come at him. Even though I expect he knows I’m about to take him on that most pleasurable of events – a walk up the street.

I try the easy way, face first with harness over his nose but he backs away and then swings from side to side as if we’re into some game of catch-me-if-you-can.

So I go about it from behind, ashamed once more that we have not yet taught this dog obedience. That we have not yet taught this dog how to sit on command, how to take orders and receive the things we offer.

But once I’m standing over him and behind he accepts the harness, to which I attach his lead and once again he’s pulling away up the hallway desperate to get out into the world beyond.

We’re scarcely free of the front door and he offers up his first pee, golden and fruity against the green and red of the kangaroo paws that line our veranda, then out onto the street for the next pee against the jacaranda on our nature strip.

It’s a warm morning and I’m on a mission. A doubling up of jobs. To buy sandwich fillings for lunch: ham, salmon and cheese, but also to appease my conscience by taking the dog out of his solitary, stationary life at home.

He pulls at his lead, ever wanting me to go faster, to run, but I refuse and yank him into a fixed and steady pace in line with my walking.

Already I’m wondering when he’ll take his first shit. When he’ll start that circular movement in the middle of someone else’s nature strip to signify the call of his bowels.

I have become obsessed with the dog’s bowels over these past several weeks ever since things started to come out of him all-wrong.

The vet diagnosed an acute case of pancreatitis or some such infection that caused this otherwise energetic dog to lose interest in life, in food, in walks and companionship.

He took to curling up lack lustre in his bed until something stirred inside and sent him out to the back garden again and again, through the cat door where he strained on his back legs underneath the washing line and out came the most vile red coloured liquid shit.

We panicked then, deciding he would die at any minute but antibiotics in time put him right again.

Today five houses up from Beaconsfield Road over the way from a two storey Queen Anne house, the dog produced a wonderful consistent khaki coloured stool that gave me the same joy I felt when my babies first offered up their insides into their nappies. That wonderful smell of new mown hay that comes out of a baby before the introduction of solids.

I felt the strangest pleasure as I bent down with my plastic dog bag, the one sealed in a red bone shaped container attached to the lead to collect the warm scrapings from my dog, careful to avoid contact with my skin.

And we walked on towards the supermarket past the houses that line this street. Houses I’ve walked past over a period of more than thirty five years. Houses that have changed little with the exception of one no longer visible.

The demolishers have ripped it out and lugged it away, piece by piece, to leave behind an empty patch of dry ground on which presumably some else will rebuild one day.

I felt a pang of sorrow at a remaining sign on the front cyclone fence that read ‘Tank eater in use’. Remembering the white weatherboard house with its full return veranda and carved entrance way that once stood here. Its proud owners, gardeners who aimed to keep their place pristine.

Now gone.

I found a rubbish bin in a nearby garage down the laneway and deposited my dog bag full of poo fearful of being spotted by the owners of the rubbish bin but hopeful they might not mind.

As I would not mind given this rubbish was sealed and ready for disposal.

As usual the dog was oblivious to all of this. Domesticated darling, and I had fulfilled my duty. To humans and animal alike.

 

 

No jokes

As a child I was wary of April Fools Day. The nun’s taught us this day commemorates Jesus on his struggle from Mount Gethsemane on his way to crucifixion and the guards who mocked him and afterwards drew lots for his clothes.

We should not therefore in all conscience make jokes on this day, the nuns said, nor should we laugh at the way others might trick someone into believing the toilet was clear for use, after the joker had spread a line of cling film over the top of the porcelain rim and then replaced the seat, leaving the cling rap to gape in the middle unseen so the poor helpless person pees into a little pool just below their bottom line.

Or worse still, some other joker might line a black toilet lid with vegemite so that some poor innocent cops a black rim around their legs when they sit to shit.

Such tricks held no appeal to me but obviously to some they were hilarious, though not for the recipients.

This jokiness has a masculine edge, or so Samuel Andrews argued, in a talk I heard recently, in which he explored what draws men into the helping profession, which traditionally has been so much a woman’s realm, except at the top.

At the top, of course, the folks who run the show are typically men, but the counsellors, the psychologists, social workers and the like are more often than not of the female persuasion and varying degrees thereof.

I went once for an internal pelvic examination and while up in the stirrups, legs spread, I wondered out loud with the female nurse /radiologist who was working the ultrasound, about my preference for a woman to undertake this task, simply because a woman felt less invasive to me.

If you give a man a choice about the gender of the person who might approach him for treatment of his genitals, most men will also ask for a woman every time. Not just out of some sort of homophobia, she said, but the view is a woman might approach the task more gently.

And yet in my time I’ve also encountered the gentlest of male nurses, men who came as kind and as thoughtful to me, as any woman could ever be.

So maybe again this construction of gender into male and female, like a black and white view of people, has knobs on it.

More and more I’m beginning to think in terms of degrees of masculinity and femininity, and all sorts of variations in between. That way we needn’t get stuck as one or the other.

We can be fluid in our sense of our bodies and ourselves in so far as our bodies and minds will allow us. We needn’t get stuck in one position or another.

My fears from last week were as I expected and hoped, unfounded. But it took not only a visit to my favourite and regular GP, but also to a second dermatologist, who as luck would have it had a cancellation and could therefore see me last Tuesday rather than at the end of May, which was his next free space.

What is it with some medical specialists? By the time you get to see them your ailment has passed or you’ve died.

This new dermatologist diagnosed three things, peri oral dermatitis, another type of dermatitis, which he called irritans or some such word, and finally some sort of fungal infection, all of which could be treated with medications that don’t even need a script, low dose cortisone and Canestan.

He also recommended I continue on the antibiotics my doctor had prescribed earlier and told me to be patient.

So I followed his advice, and after a few days saw signs of improvement to the point I’m confident now it’s healing.

The words that stay with me most clearly are those of ‘be patient’.

I fear it was my impatience that got me into trouble in the first place.

That impatience to make the fat lip from my fall heal fast which led me to use cream that had been prescribed elsewhere and to which I might have had an allergic reaction, and which then resulted in a rash that kept on spreading.

It’s a salutary lesson.

When it comes to healing there are no miracle cures.

Wounds need time to heal.

And I won’t try to explore whether this impatience comes from the masculine or the feminine side of me, nor will I try to turn it into a joke.