If you have lived the life that I have lived, you would know what it means to stare at a flushing toilet with a building sense of dread. People are being persecuted and dying of cancer, but I hope over the prayers for them, God can hear me quietly pleading, “Please flush! Please flush! Don’t overflow!”
You see, I have been afflicted with giant turds my whole life. I was stopping up our home’s plumbing in preschool. It’s not every poop, but it’s enough to be disturbing and make me think twice about dropping the kids off at the pool in any house besides my own. (Public toilets can usually handle my output, but I try to avoid pooping in public at all costs because I’m a woman and we hate it when other people can hear/smell our plops.) My hypothesis is that my colon has a larger diameter than most normal people’s. I take fiber supplements, probiotics and try to eat plenty of roughage, but sometimes stuff still comes out the size of sweet potatoes.
My 22nd birthday was one of the three or four times in my life I’ve been really drunk. Friends bought me drinks until I told a girl in line for the bathroom that her shirt made her look fat. Shortly after that I started laying my head on the table, and the friend charged with my custody for the evening, Heather, took me back to the apartment she and her boyfriend (now husband) shared. He had his best friend and that friend’s girlfriend over. I was too inebriated to take much notice of their presence, but I knew one thing for sure: I had to make a deposit in the porcelain bank.
I guess I did, but then I fell asleep on the toilet with my head on my knees. Maybe you’d call it passing out. I’m not sure how much time elapsed before Heather knocked and asked if I was OK. It woke me up enough to clean up, flush, wash hands and exit. I then changed out of my sequin shirt (I had exactly one “clubbin’” shirt in my early 20’s) and into some of her PJs, and then she led me to the futon, which she’d made up as a guest bed for me. Alcohol makes me really, really tired, so I fell asleep almost immediately, but I was awoken by her boyfriend yelling, “It’s the size of my whole arm!” I drifted off again, and then there were some screams. But no one came to get me, so I figured it didn’t concern me and went to sleep.
The next morning, I was informed what happened.
“You made the biggest turd we’ve ever seen,” Heather said.
“How could something that size come out of you?” her boyfriend chimed in. “It was the size of my arm, no, my thigh!”
Apparently he’d called his guests in to check it out as well. Not the first impression I usually like to make on people. And, as one might guess, turdzilla did not flush. A plunger did nothing because it evidently was rocks-solid and sideways. So he had a brilliant idea: a barbecue fork. He would poke it into flushable pieces. Heather and his other guests came to watch. But then the barbecue fork pierced right through my fecal deposit and wouldn’t come loose. The screams I’d heard evidently were elicited when Heather’s boyfriend thrusted the poo-fork at her in jest. I guess it took some more work, but eventually he was able to dice it up into what the average apartment plumbing could handle. Heather told me he initially tossed around the idea of putting the barbecue fork in the dishwasher afterward, but they jointly agreed the trashcan was best. And his friends whom I don’t remember if I ever saw again shall forevermore remember me as the drunk girl with the ginormous turd.
It turns out the barbecue fork wasn’t so far-fetched. I hope you saw this awesome account of one family’s poop knife. It makes me think I should have one.
As with any medical weirdness, you learn coping mechanisms. My best ones are time and Tucks pads. Time softens all turds. What requires a barbecue fork today will flush like soggy cereal tomorrow. You just have to be patient and declare that toilet off-limits until the softening occurs, usually 8 to 24 hours. Tucks pads soothe an achy anus that has liberated sizable chocolate hostages.
My husband and I did not live together before we married, but on our honeymoon, he got a real taste of what he was getting into. I clogged up the toilet of the hotel room we stayed in before departing for our Caribbean cruise. Fearing an impending overflow, we had to call maintenance. As we waited for them to come, I looked my husband dead in the eye and said, “They’re going to think you did this. And I’m not going to give them any reason to think otherwise.” Because as Heather’s boyfriend noted, I am not a large person. One would not think I could pinch off a loaf of those proportions.
It doesn’t look like this ends with me. Our 4-year-old is coming up with some toilet-cloggers of his own. He’s very proud of their size and usually wants me to see the impressive ones. He recently proclaimed, “Mommy, come see! It looks like a breadstick and a snake!” Apparently this wide-diameter colon thing is genetic.
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And here is Kansas City Royals baseball legend George Brett at spring training talking about how he poops his pants that I'm gratuitously including because it's about poop and makes me quake with laughter.
