Drop Your Pants. Now Hold Your Knees.

left: The vile parasite that I think I'm harboring in my gut, the one that causes Giardia.

For four weeks, ever since I returned from Vietnam, I had been feeling as if there was some sort of rambunctious creature rolling and swelling in my stomach. Some days it would sleep, on others it would convulse. I had been waiting with hopes that the creature would die after a few weeks of wallowing in my duodenal darkness, but it only seemed to thrive inside of me. This past Monday, I had had enough. I told my supervisor about my gastric drama while we were walking to class.

“Uh, Namiki-sensei, I think I’m still sick from Vietnam. My stomach,” I said as I patted my stomach for effect. Her eyebrows shot up and she stepped to the side, away from me, ever so slightly.

“Really?” she asked. “But Vietnam was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I think maybe I should go to a doctor.”

“OK, I will take you to the school nurse after class.”

The nurse asked about my symptoms. Does he have stomach pains at night? Does he hurt now? Does he want some tea? Does he have ‘normal bathrooms’? Determining some sort of prescription medication was in my future, she phoned a few local clinics that only treat teachers and students. We found one with an open slot in the afternoon and Namiki-sensei and I cut out of school early to go to a clinic.

The receptionist at the clinic asked me to fill out a new patient form. I left the box for “Cell phone number” blank because…get ready…I don’t have a cell phone. I know—it’s shocking. When I returned the form, the receptionist turned to my supervisor and said, “Oh, tell him he forgot to write his cell phone number.”

“You forgot to write your cell phone number.”

“I don’t have a cell phone,” I said. Namiki-sensei’s eyes flashed open like blooming fireworks.

“He doesn’t have a cell phone,” she told the receptionist in Japanese. I watched as the receptionist internalized this startling fact. I instantly went from Strange-white-guy-from-America to Threatening-weirdo-from-Saturn’s-coldest-moon. She scribbled something on the form and waved us back to the doctor’s office.

After a short interrogation about my eating and drinking habits while in Vietnam, the doctor told my supervisor I would need two types of tests to determine the root of my ailments. Namiki-sensei blushed as she started speaking to me.

“She wants to test your bloods and your…uh…your stools,” Namiki-sensei said.

“My stools? More than one? Isn’t one enough?” I asked, laughing. Pause. “When do I have to get the two tests done?” I figured she’d say something like, “Oh, you can come back by yourself next week on your lunch break and give them bloods and stools.”

Japanese question for the doctor. Japanese answer for the teacher.

“Now is OK for both,” said Namiki-sensei.

I felt blood rush up into my cheeks like mercury in a thermometer thrust into a primed oven. Hearing the word “stools” spill from the tiny, blushed face of my tiny, overly-polite supervisor supplied me with my week’s worth of awkwardness. I wasn’t up for shitting in cup and having to ask her, “What next?”

There are some people in the world who are so ever-put together, so well-packaged and meticulous in their grooming, so polite and dainty each and every morning when they smile and say hello that you assume they never shit. Ever. You assume they walk into secret, darkened closets in their homes each night so they can feed hidden incinerators with the contents of their tiny shit resevoirs that they keep hidden in lint-free pouches in their pants. My supervisor is one of those people.

“Now you can go to the next room for two tests. I will wait outside the curtain to help.”

My mind started racing—Oh dear Gods! Why me? Not only will she have to translate the nurse’s directions, she’s going to stand right outside some flimsy curtain and hear me shit as well?! What egregious error have I committed in my past to warrant such embarrassment?! Was it that time when I was nine when I cut off the older Dowdy boy as we raced bikes around the court and I made him fall and break his wrist? I’m sorry! I’ll break my own wrist to neutralize the sin! Please, I’ll do it right now! There must be a hammer I could use or at least one of those knee reflex hammers around here somewhere…

The nurse, an old, stocky woman in pink scrubs with an overturned-canoe-shaped pink hat teetering on her sea of curly gray hair, waved me over.

First the blood test. An arm stand and a lonely stool (the kind you sit on as opposed to depart with) were prepared in the middle of the room next door. Without hearing instructions, I knew what I had to do for this part. I sat and rolled up my sleeve. The nurse tied up my arm and flicked a bulging vein. She slipped in the needle and drew what seemed to be far more blood than necessary, completely filling one large syringe. Bandaged, I stood up. The nurse waved me to a bed behind, just as I had feared, a very flimsy curtain. As I stepped behind the curtain to face my doom, I glanced back at my supervisor—she was standing three feet from the curtain’s edge.

“Good luck,” she said.

I tried to smile.

The nurse closed the curtain and motioned for me to drop my pants. I did so. Then she made a sleeping gesture by closing her eyes and holding her hands to her face like a pillow. She pointed to the bed--I was supposed to lay down. I became confused. Where’s the cup or plate for me to shit on? Actually, come to think of it, I don’t see any toilet paper either. What kind of backwoods shit test was this going to be? Am I supposed to lay down and shit in her hand??

I laid down on the bed. She motioned for me to lay sideways. I did. Then she said something I couldn’t understand. She said it again. She wasn’t giving me gestures and I was clueless as to what she wanted me to do. Does she want me to try to shit…right now? On the bed? Will they roll up the blankets and send the whole mess to the lab? Surely there must be a more efficient way to check one’s stool.

She repeated her request. I still couldn’t understand. Then, the nurse trotted out through the curtain and spoke to my supervisor.

Namiki-sensei laughed. “She wants you to pull your knees up to your chest. Hold your knees very tight,” she said.

At this point I had no idea was going on. How in the world am I going to shit like that? I thought.

The nurse came back through the curtain. I pulled my knees up, and, feeling more vulnerable than I think I’ve ever felt before in my life, I fearfully looked over my shoulder at the nurse. She reached into her pink jacket pocket and pulled out a single long-handled cotton swab sheathed in a bulbous, plastic test-tube.

She paused for just a moment and smiled at me. “Gomen, gomen,” [Sorry, sorry] she said.

With seemingly instinctual precision, she removed the cotton swab, grabbed my left ass cheek, and pierced me with her very dry and un-lubed cotton spear. I flinched.

Whooooah, for a cotton swab, that sure hurt! Jesus! How in the world do people have anal sex? I thought.

Swirling it gently like someone fishing for ear wax, she probed for three or four seconds and removed her soiled lance. Bada bing, bada boom, she sheathed the swab, took off her gloves, and apologized once more. She laughed and motioned for me to pull up my pants. We were finished. She had just explored a straight man’s most guarded orifice and seemed happier than a lark. A true medical professional.

In the car driving back to school, Namiki-sensei looked over at me with nothing but concern in her eyes and sincerity in her voice and said, “I hope your stools are OK.”

“Thanks. Me too.”