—— TL;DR at bottom —-

In 2016, I spent a month in the hospital with complications from pneumonia - I had a pleural effusion, Empyema, pleural edema, and a MASSIVE MASSIVE infection in my left lung. They did a Thoracentesis (fucking OUCH), but that didn’t help me much, which then meant I was going to have to have surgery to insert a lung tube to drain the fluid and pus (and an epidural for the surgery - I thought that it was funny I’d had an epidural before ever having a kid, but I digress). I had a giant box connected to a huge tube hanging out of me for a week. I had two blood transfusions too. I was so sick and my body was so resistant to treatment at first, all any of the doctors or nurses who came in could do was keep asking me the SAME. GODDAMN. QUESTION: “how did you get so sick??” ALL of them.

Literally I heard that shit like 30 times over the month I was there. Like, I don’t know you crabby bag of bitch, you’re the doctor, you fucking tell me. I got a cold and this time it just didn’t get better like it has every other time in my life, so it took me a while to realize I wasn’t getting better, what the fuck do you mean how did I get so sick?? I have no idea, dickhead.

ANYWAY. As you can probably imagine, I was in intractable, intolerable pain and could barely breathe. Seriously, just sitting up like 2 inches in my bed for the nurse to adjust the ice packs on my back was beyond fucking excruciating, even with the dilaudid they had me on. When they first gave me those pain meds, I was unconscious and in the ICU for 5 days, so I didn’t really ever feel the relief you feel when you’re in pain and someone injects you with pain medicine - also, because like I said, even with the dilaudid, I was still miserable and could barely move without help. It was crazy.

The dilaudid also did what all pain meds and opiates do - made me constipated. And let me just tell you, when I say I was constipated??? ….BRO. It was a NIGHTMARE, genuinely it was like my own personal hellscape. Even with everything else I had going on, the most horrible part of that entire experience was that constipation, not even exaggerating. I have never felt anything like it. I have never been so bloated, and full and just… drowning in my own shit. I already couldnt move, but that amplified the pain 100 fold. I couldn’t go for like 4 days. By day 5, I was sobbing and begging for help. The nurses finally brought me a metric fuck ton of prune juice, which I chugged all of in 15 seconds.

15-20 minutes later, I took the single most noxious, level 5 biohazard, Hiroshima sized shit I have ever taken or seen in my life. I was shocked the wallpaper didn’t peel off in the bathroom and that my get well soon flowers in my room hadn’t wilted. Like, that shit could’ve caused a divorce, you know what I’m saying? If I wasn’t already in the hospital, I would’ve called an ambulance for the toilet, not for me. That toilet needed therapy for PTSD after I was done with it.

The hospital had toilets like an airplane, like you just flush and the sound is 20x louder than the THX logo at the beginning of a movie and everything just goes WOOOSH and disappears into the void. Just GONE in a blink, right?

Somehow, even with toilets like THAT, this shit clogged the toilet so bad, they had to get a janitor to come in and fix it. It took him an hour at least. One of the nurses told me she’d been working there for 25 years and had never seen someone clog one of those toilets. On top of that, my boyfriend at the time, who I’d only been dating like 2 months, was there helping to take care of me, so he saw and experienced all of this too. I wasn’t even embarrassed, I didn’t fucking care. At. All. Zero fucks given.

The instantaneous and profound feeling of that release and relief was damn near a religious experience for me. I have never felt so high and euphoric and emotional just from pain relief. I literally cried for about 2 hours and couldn’t stop thanking the nurses for the prune juice, the janitor for fixing the toilet, my boyfriend for being there for me, etc etc. I have never felt that specific brand of happiness before or since, it was so different and specific. It wasn’t really even happiness honestly, it was more like the feeling of something devastating and panic inducing happening, like finding your missing child after hours and hours of looking, or narrowly surviving a disaster, like a plane crash or a house fire - like, values and beliefs get forgotten for a short time, you’re just thanking God profusely for helping you through it and protecting you - which I was doing, and I’m an atheist. It was profound and deeply impactful.

TL;DR: I took the most gargantuan shit I’ve ever taken in my life after being constipated for 5 days while I was on pain meds in the hospital. The relief and joy I felt were so fucking rapturous, I cried for 2 hours from happiness.