Irritable Bowel?
Pretty bloody FURIOUS is more like it!





One, two....three...........PUSH !!!


Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is the most inappropriate label since Goebbels describe Hitler's feelings towards Jews as "a little bit negative."

After spending a couple of weeks on a self-imposed detox, I have timidly ventured into eating a bit of sugar, cake, choccie and wine again, only to have my sphincter crack a full-sized hissy fit in immediate retaliation. Instead of cleansing out my system, I think the detox has made my Furious Bloody Bowel Syndrome even more sensitive - just a mere inhalation of the hundreds and thousands covering Sapphire's birthday cake the other day was enough to have me locked in our laundry loo, shivering in misery and producing pretty well nothing. (Note to self - must must MUST get a new window - the permanently-open louvres from the 1950s letting in the stiff winter breezes are not making lingering loo moments very comfortable).

As if Love Chunks hasn't had to endure many horrible nights of Doona Dutch Ovens and having my butt blasts follow me in from the back door to the living room, he now has to come and request that I ~ ahem ~ "Fill up a friggin' bucket and flush those river pebbles down and out of my sight." Whilst I bask in the security and endurance of his love and admiration, I think that viewing my abnormal excrement is not on his list of turn-ons....

Why do we use such gentle terms to describe such arse-tearingly awful ailments?
Strep Throat sounds a tad annoying, but if you have some streptococci setting up camp in your oesophagus you're in for a world of pain that isn't visible from the outside but makes even breathing in air an awful act to contemplate.

Wisdom teeth 'removal' - ah, if it were only that simple. Getting them taken out 'in the chair' sounded so easy, so quick. Several hours later, my jumper was dripping with cold sweat, my ears were filled up with tears of terror and the dentist (or should I say student) had to yell at me to stop hyperventilating. My eyes were squeezed shut, but my water-logged ears definitely heard the assisting nurse exclaim, "Oh Nooo!"
"Don't worry about it, Nance," was the hung-over reply from the stupid student.
The drama of my 'removal in the chair' was also relayed to the next few suckers in the waiting room who witnessed me falling through the stainless steel saloon doors, drooling blood - there was no budget for cotton pads - and gurgling, "Love Chu-u-u-u-u-u-n-k-s? Take me home now!"

Minimal Tearing during childbirth - Over eight summers ago, LC and I were eagerly lapping up all of the advice provided in the pre-birthing classes. At least, until we saw the birth video and the voiceover gleefully announced, "Sandie is so lucky - she has only torn two centimetres." I wanted to suck that foetus up my fallopian tubes like iced coffee through a straw it terrified me so much. As for my own situation a few months later, let's just say that I tore from A to V and walked like an arthritic cowboy for two months afterward.

You're all just meat on a slab to me, said the doctor, as I blushingly eased myself onto the examination trolley, dreading my annual pap smear. It was OK for him - he does hundreds of them a year but for a relatively modest gal who had never even seen him before turning herself in a pornographic letter 'Y', it wasn't so common. To add more fuel to my already fire-red face, the window of the examination room directly faced out onto the Greensborough line and the blinds were open. "Er, Doctor P, would you mind closing those blinds? I don't want to give the Eltham folk a free peep show on the way home."
He rolled his eyes, leaned over to snap them shut with his left hand while still inserting some kind of enormous stapler inside me with his right.
"Oh and doctor? I'm MillyMoo, it's nice to meet you. What's your name?"

Insomnia - sounds more like an exotic holiday destination: "Dina's just choofed off to Insomnia for a fortnight of wine, men and song, the lucky duck..." Instead, it's the term used for a protracted period of sleep deprivation that is also adopted with inhumane enthusiasm by international torture experts. There's nothing lonelier than lying awake at 3.00am hearing the sound of regular breathing beside you (or outboard motor-loud snoring) knowing that you won't be heading in the same blissful direction and it sure as hell doesn't prepare you for a two hour meeting after lunch on 'strategic performance indicators' when your eyes look and feel like fractured jaffas.

It only takes a second to take it out said the medical researcher after spending close to one hour inserting a lubricated tube up my nose, down my throat and attaching the end to a scary-looking refrigerator that measured my stomach waves. And yes, she was right - it did only take a few seconds to pull out the tube faster than going about on a Sydney-to-Hobart racing skiff, but the demonic little valve on the end was sharply angled for insertion, not removal and sliced my throat and inside of my nose like a whip as it departed. Luckily for the researcher I was too busy staggering about the room in shock and agony to ram her head into the sharps bin.