Breathe in, breathe out...

I have had the unfortunate luck to have had to visit a hospital for surgery recently. Not for my own, but for someone very near and dear to me. While he was undergoing his procedure, I was able to observe (and now report) on various forms of life frequenting the same hospital.

Needless to say, there are some very tragic cases in hospitals. I sympathize both with the patients and their families. To. A. Point.

I sympathize with the family of a young girl who was obviously undergoing just one more in a series of cancer treatments and bided my time in the same waiting area as her family who were anxiously awaiting her to be wheeled into post-op. She was all of 19 years old, her whole life ahead of her, yadda yadda yadda.

There was, however, another patient who was being wheeled into surgery shortly after my own near and dear was on his way. She was also wheeled out before he was, so I was privy - in the "semi-private" pre- and post-op area - to all her details. Curtains, it should be noted, offer no privacy whatsoever.

This other patient. What can be said. She was whiny and begging for painkillers before they even left the pre-op waiting area. It appeared to my non-medical viewpoint that it was unjustifiably loud protesting on her part. In short, it was damned annoying.

Later, while waiting for my near and dear to recover enough where I could take him home, I got to sit just on the other side of the curtain while she shared some delightful conversation with the attending nurse. The nurse was explaining the "wadding" and how it was strategically located up her anus and reassured the patient that should it fall out, during bathing or otherwise, that all she had to do was stuff some more back up in there, and that they'd send home some extra wadding with her just for that purpose.

The question needs to be asked: WHAT THE HELL DID SHE DO TO HER BUTT?!

Only a Baby Boomer would have such an ailment. Because I am morbidly curious about such things, I needed to postulate some possibilities as to what might have happened:

1) Was it a matter of her not getting up off her fat ass frequently enough where something else might have simply backed up, or worse yet, did she sit on something and that something got lodged up there, possibly a TV remote control, causing some inherent damage on entry?

2) Was it eating too many trans-fat-laden foods and some kind of blockage occurred where on an attempt to evacuate said anus, something blew a valve?

3) I'm inclined to think - because I was tempted to do this myself while I sat there listening to her whine incessantly about how she was suffering so much more than the other patients and needed painkillers "Stat!" - that someone, possibly her husband or other significant other, rammed their boot up her ass to shut her up, and it simply got stuck there.

Yeah, let's go with that. In fact, let's encourage it.