Friday, January 2, 2015

Clean Up On Isle Three




Have you ever had sympathy pain for someone when they were hurt?  I have heard many stories of men having sympathy pains for their wives while in labor.  Do your eyes water when you see someone get poked in the eye and their eyes are watering?  Mine do, I'm a self proclaimed sympathetic eye waterer.  People come into the clinic all the time with very red watering eyes and within seconds the flood gates open and there I go.  Have you ever yawned after watching someone else yawn?  The answer to that question is probably yes.  Someone in a group yawns and before you know it, everyone is yawning.  Finally someone will yell out "Stop That" like it was someone's fault.  Y'all know what I am talking about.  Studies show that it's an empathy or bonding response with others that is not completely understood.  

Well besides being that guy who's eyes sympathetically water like Niagara Falls at the sight of red watery eyes I unfortunately have a second sympathetic response that is far more unpleasant than your typical red eye.  I am in fact a sympathetic gagger as well.  If you start gagging or tossing your cookies I am right there with you gagging away myself.  I have been in medicine twenty nine years and as soon as I see someone gagging in the ER I jump right on the gagging band wagon with them.  It's almost as if two of us are engaged in this at the same time then it some how speeds up the process and the mission is accomplished much quicker.  Do any of you remember what the old Double Mint chewing gum commercial once said "Double your pleasure and double the fun" so surely two gaggers are without a doubt much better than one. lol.  

The worst part about me being a sympathetic gagger is that it's not subtle.  I'm one of those loud gut wrenching toe curling guys.  If gagging was made into an Olympic sport I could be a gold medalist for sure. I know this sounds kind of gross and the reason I bring it up (no pun intended) is because this happened at my house several weeks ago but fortunately Red Dog and I weren't the participants.  It involves my wonderful wife and our ginormous house cat Mr. Buttons.

My wife Debbie prides herself at being a loving attentive wife and mother.  Over the many years of raising kids she has done every nasty smelly gross mommy job under the sun.  I have seen her clean up some of the stinkiest little rear ends on the planet and wrestle messy poopy diapers off of those same little bottoms.  She has endured white smelly baby vomit running down her chest,  washed wranglers that look and smelled like they were drug through a cow lot (which they were I might add) and watched her bathe two large stinky dogs covered in skunk spray without blinking an eye.  She is Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, Bionic Woman, and Xena the Princess Warrior all wrapped up into one when it comes to taking charge around the house but the other day I witnessed a chink in her armor and no one was more surprised than I.  It came in the form of one of the largest nastiest looking hair balls that a cat has ever produced in the history of man kind.  All compliments of Mr. Buttons our two ton lazy house cat.  I mean this thing was nasty with a capitol "N" and here is how it all went down.


It all began on a very pleasant warm Saturday morning.  We got up and headed off for our regular Saturday morning breakfast date like always. We made our usual stop to the feed store on our way home to pickup some scratch for the chickens.  Once home I sat back in my over sized comfortable recliner with a hot cup of coffee to finish my morning with a weekly deer hunt on the Outdoor Channel.  My morning was slowly winding down and the plan of hunting until lunch time was coming along quit nicely.  


I decided to make myself a sandwich and then see how much nap time I could squeeze in before supper.  (Deer hunting always makes me hungry and sleepy...lol).  My plan was working out very well until I suddenly (and loudly I might add) heard Debbie scream " No Mr. Buttons!!! No!!!"  It wasn't one of those "you are in so much trouble" type of screams that I have personally heard many times during thirty two years of marriage but this one was different.

  Out of pure instinct I sheepishly sunk deep into my big fluffy recliner just in case she was screaming at me.  I know I said she screamed out Mr. Buttons name but from past experience my wife has called me by all of my kids names, my brother in law's name and she even sometimes goes through the whole family tree before getting to my name when I am in trouble.  All you married guys out there understand what I'm talking about, right?  Well if your wife hasn't done it I know your mothers certainly have and when we heard our first, middle and last yelled out by our mamma's, we knew there was trouble in River City.  But there was something different about this particular scream.  It was more of a panic like scream but I still tried to make myself invisible just in case.  Then I heard Debbie yell out again "Oh No, Oh No" and she swiftly darted out the front door.  Since my back was to the door I couldn't see a thing and heard the door slam shut behind me.  I said to myself "self you may not be in trouble here".  But before I could muster the courage to come out of hiding I heard the front door open and suddenly slam shut again.  I also heard her yell out "Oh No" again as well.  By this time I figured out that she wasn't yelling at me so I walked out the front door to see my poor sweet wife throwing up in her flower bed in the front yard.

I must admit that my initial thought was oh crud she's pregnant again and unfortunately for me that was the first question that came running out of my mouth (there are days when my thought filter doesn't work very well and this was one of those day).  There she was on her hands and knees in our front yard violently vomiting into her poor pitiful looking flower garden that has been devastated by a four year drought and she looked up at me like I was the most ignorant man on the planet and snarled "No I'm not pregnant, I've had a hysterectomy".  Duh!  It wasn't one of my finer medical moments to say the least and that old saying about there is no such  thing as a dumb question, well,  I have news for you, there is!

  So after asking her if she was ok I cautiously asked a second question.  What made her sick.  She told me that Mr. Buttons hacked up the grossest hair ball she had ever seen on the carpet in our bedroom and when she reluctantly attempted to clean it up she started to toss her cookies so she ran outside.  Of course I had to ask the most obvious third  question which was much safer than question number one.  
Why did you run outside to get sick when the toilet was just a few feet away?  Her answer was that she did not have time to clean the toilet before she vomited.  What!!!  She wanted to clean the toilet before barfing in it.  I was very confused at this point.  Then she told me she refuses to stick her face in a place where people sat their naked bottoms (that's necked bottom if your from the south)without cleaning it first!

  I remember her telling me this in the past but just thought she was pulling my leg.  Apparently there isn't any leg pulling when it comes to the issue of vomiting in the toilet and as I thought about her clean toilet issues it began to make some sort of sense to me.  You don't sneeze on someone else's meal and we don't slobber in someone else's ice tea so I guess it's reasonable to think that we shouldn't stick our face in the toilet before it's cleaned.  I think it was Jim Croce who said you don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off the ole Long Ranger and you don't vomit in a dirty toilet or something like that. Once again I have been enlightened by my wonderful wife.  

So what is the take home message of today's adventure.  Well first, I would say never own a two ton indoor cat because bad stuff could show up on the bedroom carpet.  The second would be to never ask the wife, who has had a hysterectomy, if she is pregnant while she is barfing up her toenails because you will become the dumbest person on the planet in her eyes.  Thirdly I would say never use your toilet ever again for its intended purpose because your wife may need to vomit in the next century.  And finally, if for some reason your wife does need to go vomit in your front yard "DO NOT" remind her that barfing in the front yard on her hands and knees might have been entertaining for the entire neighborhood or you might find yourself eating bologna sandwiches for the next several days.  Until the next adventure God bless you all.