21 years ago today, December 31, 2001, about ten in the morning I woke up to a pain in my gut that shattered my reality. I writhed in bed for well over an hour crying and thinking I’m going to die from a burst appendix.

I had just turned 21 and took advantage of it the whole month. I moved back home earlier that year, so the house was full but, on that day, there was no one home. I was stuck in the fetal position staring at the clock, crying. I finally fell off my bed and crawled to the phone 30 feet away to call my mom at work. She came and took me to the ER.

I got rolled in and put in a bed next to an elderly woman who was experiencing great distress and bloody. The doctor, tall and long haired, rushed in and looked at me and mom and I told him to help her first. I swear he said, “no shit”, or something along those lines but that’s not the last time he said the word shit to me.

I got x-rays of my abdomen and poked a whole bunch of times. After what felt like hours, the doctor came back to me after reading my chart. The elderly lady was in the next bed doing better, mom was the chair beside me, and I was still felt like I was going to explode.

He read the room and got in close to me, put his hand up like a secret and whispered to the whole room, “I don’t know how to tell you this but your colon is full of shit.”

With his face in mine and to the whole room I yelled, “Well get it out of me!”

In his animated way he said, “I can give you a suppository, an enema, or you drink this drink.”

Butt stuff was not vibing with me feeling like I’m about to explode so I told him to give me the drink. Magnesium Citrate, never heard of before, but I’m forever grateful it exists and I can’t believe it’s cheaper than bottled water. The Mickey’s style grenade bottle of super salty medicine went down fighting the whole way.

It was probably 30 minutes, but felt like the world stopped moving through space, the grenade started to make horrific waves through my bowls. Nothing else mattered except my the xenomorph running around in my guts and hit. It hit hard. I was peeing out my ass for eight hours straight.

I was cleansing ever hour but it’s new year’s eve and I’m 21. Peeing out my butt every 15 minutes or so wasn’t going to stop me from going out and seeing long friends. It was a great party and it was a running joke of my runs. I asked my mom this morning about the time she left work to take me to the ER because I had to take a shit and she dropped her face remembering humiliation and said, “that was 21 years ago?”.

TL;DR Shit happens.