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- [00:00]
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- [01:09]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. So just a final reminder before we get started with the story today, the Moths membership drive is still underway. So help us keep our podcast fresh, free, and help us keep our public radio show on the air by becoming a member@the moth.org and thank you for all your support. We're also happy to announce that the Moth will be back at the World Science Festival this year, and that's going to be June 4th. This week's story by Andy Borowitz was recorded live at the Moth as part of that festival in 2008. The theme theme of the night was Stories of Adams and Eve's Here's Annie.
- [01:56]
Andy Borowitz
So last fall, my wife Olivia and I are getting ready to go to a party, but I'm not really feeling up to it. I've been feeling kind of crappy the last few days. I've had these weird stomach pains and kind of bloated. I kind of look like I'm in my third trimester. And I've been constipated, which is weird for me, I've got to say. I just got to tell you this. I am very regular, okay? And I know that sounds like bragging, but as we age, we wear that like a badge of honor. So I just say that. So Olivia calls the health insurance hotline that we've got and talks to a nurse and she runs down my symptoms from the nurse. And then the nurse asks her to ask me, when was the last time that you passed gas? And I realized at this point that my record keeping on this is terrible. So she asks, well, was it in the last 24 hours? And I think about it, and I'm like, no, I don't think so. And so then the nurse says to Olivia, you've got to get him to an emergency room within the next. So we go to the emergency room and we check in at the triage unit, which I've got to say, is not a reassuring name for a unit at all. It's like the worst thing to call a unit, in a way. And the intake nurse, first question she asked me is, she said, can you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10? And I say, 6, which is a huge mistake, because at that point, an immediate sense of calm and relaxation sets in over my case. And they busy themselves with the people who said 7 through 10. You know, that's just the way it works. So it takes a couple of hours. They finally X ray me, and I'm taken to an examining room, and a doctor comes in, and this doctor is 12. I mean, I feel like I'm being waited on at the Apple Store. I mean, that's the only. And I've got this big belly. And I say to him, doctor, I say, what's up with this? And he says, well, my diagnosis is distension. And I said, you mean my stomach is distended? And he said, that's correct. And I'm like, well, clearly, I'm not dealing with Dr. House here, you know, but he orders a CAT scan, and I go through that. And then for the next couple of hours or so, a bunch of other doctors come into the room. And disturbingly, each time a new doctor comes in, he's slightly higher on the medical hierarchy at the hospital. So I'm pretty sure the next person who comes in is going to be Hippocrates, the father of medicine. But finally, a guy comes in with a CAT scan results, and he is a surgical resident. Now, the only word that's worse than triage is surgical, because you know that something bad is about to happen. And he says, well, we have good news in a way, which is we know what's wrong with you. And I said, well, what is it? And he says, your colon is twisted. And this is something called a sigmoid volvulus. I mean, I know a lot of you already know what that means, since this is the scientist and all, but basically what it means is that the colon has formed a knot, and nothing's going in and nothing's coming out. It's like midtown. Now, my wife Olivia, is a former journalist, and she has a knack for asking, like, the perfect question that just gets right to the truth of the matter. So she asks, is he in danger? And the doctor says, yes. Now, I should probably say at this point that at this point in time, Olivia and I have been married for nine months. These have been the happiest nine months of my life. And just being with her has erased all the sadness of all the years leading up to this. And during those nine months, many times I've said to myself, life is so awesome right now. It would take something really freaky to fuck this up. So I say to the doctor, what's next? And he says, well, we have two options. And the first option is one we'd rather not do, which is, he said, emergency surgery. We go in, we cut out the part of the colon that's twisted, and then we sew the two ends back together. And the reason this is not a good option is because, as you can imagine, the colon is a very contaminated part of the body. And when you do emergency surgery in those conditions, the chances of an infection and then sepsis setting in are pretty high, and that will kill you. So I said, well, what's the other option? So the other option is that we take a colonoscopy tool with the camera on the end, and we just use it as a tool, and we stick it up your rectum, and we try to manually untwist your colon. And if this works, we will then spend the next couple days in the hospital just flushing out your system, getting your colon nice and sterile. And then on Friday, we'll do that operation, but it will be under sterile optimal condition, and you'll be good to go. So I'm like, shove the camera up my ass. Let's go. So they do it, and thank God it works. They untwist my colon. I check into the hospital. I'm in a room. They spend the next couple of days flushing out my system.
- [08:23]
Dan Kennedy
And.
- [08:23]
Andy Borowitz
And by Friday, my colon is clean as a whistle. It's unbelievable. And I go in for the surgery, and miraculously, the surgery goes exactly as planned. Perfect. So I'm in my room, and I'm recovering. And for the first time, I meet my surgeon who's performed this on me. And he's a very nice Chinese gentleman named Dr. Ho. And Dr. Ho speaks perfect English, but he's chosen to speak it in this very abbreviated, clipped fashion, sort of like Confucius on Twitter. That's the only way I can describe it. Everything is, like four characters, and then he's out. So I asked him, like, so when you got in there, what did you do to my colon? And he said, remove two feet. They took out two feet of my colon, and I'm thinking, that's a lot of colon to be removed. And I said, why so much? And he said colon was redundant. And that is the extent of my conversation with Dr. O. He's out. He's out to tweet some more to somebody else. So it's awesome. Olivia takes me home, and we're feeling like we really dodged a bullet. But then I get home, and I'm not feeling so great. I'm sort of feeling chills and shivers. And I get into bed, and I sort of pull. Pull up the sheets all the way to my chin, sort of like I'm a little kid home from school. I'm feeling bad. Then I notice that every time I sit up, I vomit. And this gets worse and worse until. I mean, I know some of us vomit occasionally, but this is like continuous vomiting. It's like I've just seen a Matthew McConaughey movie or something. It's just uncontrollable. And so we know something is majorly fucked up. So Olivia takes me back to the hospital, and we go back to the emergency room, and I get back to the triage unit, and the nurse there says, can you rate your pain from 1 to 10? And I am like, 10, motherfucker. Which turns out to be the correct answer, by the way, for future reference. So they take my vitals. They take my vitals. I am so dehydrated from all this vomiting that my heart rate at rest is like, 120. My blood pressure is, like, just plummeting to the floor. And I'm in a state of dehydration, which is known as organ failure. My organs are now failing. So they strap me to a gurney, they put an IV in me. They start pumping me with fluids. They thread a tube up my nose and down my throat to start pumping all the bile out of my stomach. And just quarts of bile are coming out of me, and I'm on there. And they give me an emergency X ray of my abdomen. And then with the X rays, a few minutes later, Dr. Ho appears again, and he explains to me that when they sewed up the two parts of my colon, apparently, somehow it sprung a leak, and my colon is now currently leaking into the rest of my abdomen. And they can identify gas sort of in the vicinity of my liver, which is not really where it's supposed to be. And I say, well, so are we going to do that thing where we flush out my body for a couple of days and then we get things nice and clean and then you operate? And he said, no, we don't have that option here. We've got to do emergency surgery. Exactly what we were trying to avoid the last week, because this can kill you. So I can see Olivia has one of those journalistic questions coming on, but this time she takes one of the residents outside of the room and asks this question out of my earshot. And she comes back into the room, and I can see that there are tears in her eyes. And I say to her, did you get some bad news? And she just says, I just love you so much. And I'm like, I am fucked. I'm like, just bring in the rabbi right now. Because I am so over. I am so over. But I can tell that she's really very upset and she's falling apart. And so I called out for a nurse and I said, nurse, can we have a tranquilizer for my wife? She really needs something. But it's what the resident has told her and she hasn't told me. The resident has said, with this kind of surgery, the odds of surviving it are about 50%. That's about what you got. So they wheel me into surgery, and three hours later, magically, I awake. So I know that I've somehow survived this. And, I mean, that's not exactly a spoiler I'm here, right? I mean, come on, you weren't following this very closely. All right, so I'm recovering, and there again appears Dr. Ho, and he explains to me what they've done to me, which is that they've wrapped up my colon where they think the leak was, and they wanted to make it absolutely tight. So what they've done, they're taking no chances this time. They're going to give the colon a few months to heal. And the way they're doing that is they have diverted my digestive tract elsewhere. Like, what is that? Like when you close the upper roadway on the gwb? I mean, what does this mean? What this means is they have taken out part of my small intestine and pulled it outside of my body, and it is now currently emptying out into something called an ileostomy, which is a fancy medical name for plastic bag of shit. I am not kidding You. That's what's there. It's right there. Dr. Ho has literally torn me a new asshole, and it's here where assholes do not belong. So I'm, like, getting this bad news, and he says, he tweets to me, only three months. Only three months. Then they do a reversal surgery. At the end of three months, they put your small intestine back in, and you're good to go. Now I'm, like, rocked by this news. Like, how am I going to live with this? And just seconds later, this nurse appears, and her job at the hospital is to spread pro ileostomy propaganda. I'm not kidding. She has a magazine called the Phoenix. And the Phoenix is a glossy magazine devoted to the ileostomy lifestyle. Who knew? And you go through the Phoenix, and it's like, gq. They're, like all these sexy people, and they're like, you know, at the beach, and they're at a barbecue, and they're playing tennis and they're dancing, but presumably underneath their clothing is a fucking bag of shit. All right, so we go home, and Livy and I, we're like, we've got three months to live with this thing. I'm getting to the gross parts, and Livy and I are living. And I'm feeling like at this point that I've, like, totally done a bait and switch on this poor girl. Because nine months earlier, when we got married, I was, like, healthy and robust. And now I'm, like, totally broken down. I look at myself in the mirror. I have lost £25. I've got, like, supermodel legs, and I look like a scarecrow with this bag of shit. There's no other way to say it. It's a sack of shit right there. And I take a closer look at it, and I can see that that little piece of the small intestine, the stoma, is, like, protruding further from me than it's, like, coming out of my body. It's like, have you seen alien? This is what's gone. So we go back to Dr. Ho, and now we get the first good news of this whole story, which is he says, you have something called a prolapsedoma, which means your intestine is coming out of your body. And that means we have to move up your rehearsal, your reversal surgery, by a month. So a month earlier than planned. I'm going to return to the land of the normal. So I remember checking in the hospital, lying on the operating room table, and I'm about to go under an anesthesia and Dr. Ho is there, and he looks me in the eye and he says the longest single sentence he said to me since this whole thing began, he says, look, I know you've had a lot of complications with these first two surgeries. So. So I'm going to be extra careful this time. You got to love that learning curve, you know, no more boozing up in the or.
- [18:16]
Dan Kennedy
We're going to focus.
- [18:17]
Andy Borowitz
We're going to focus. Well, obviously, I made it. As some people of you have figured out, I made it. I survived. I'm here. But before I go, I need to get to the part of the story where I tell you what life lessons my colon has taught me. And I'm going to write a book about this called Tuesdays With My Colon where I just, you know, go over those life lessons. But here's the thing. You know, I was always the kind of guy who went through life and said, you know, life is precious and you got to make the most of every minute. But I've got to say, you don't really believe that or know it or feel it until your life is almost taken away from you. And that is, like, totally true. And so now what I do every morning when I get up, I do two things. I'm still in bed. I look out the window and I look at the city, the beautiful city and sun coming up over the city. And I check that out. And then I look in the other direction and I look at my beautiful wife sleeping next to me. And I realize at that moment that I've got today and I have everything. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
- [19:37]
Dan Kennedy
Andy Borowitz is a humor contributor to the New York and the host of PBS's Next Week's News. His numerous books include the Borowitz Report, the Big Book of Shockers, a collection of articles from his online column the Borowitz Report. He received the first National Press Club Humor Writing Award. Our collaboration with the World Science Festival continues on June 4th with our show Dark Night Stories of Science Stars Aligned. This year's festival takes place June 1st through 5th. For more information, please visit worldsciencefestival.com hi.
- [20:17]
Jay Allison
This is Jay Allison, producer of the Moth Radio Hour, the Peabody Award winning Moth Radio Hour, I might add, presented by the public radio exchange. Prx.org I'm talking to you from Cape Cod where we are just finishing our new season of five shows. So call your public radio station, find out when they're airing it and then plan some long drives around their schedule. We hope you like it.
- [20:41]
Rosetta Stone Advertiser
Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy is the author of the book Rock An Office Power Ballad. Learn more@rockonthebook.com thanks to all of you.
- [20:50]
Dan Kennedy
For listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York Podcast hosting by PRX Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.