Reflections on nearly dying the other day

“We really need you to fart,” the cute nurse said sternly as I lay on my hospital bed, feeling the hookah of the morphine drip silently bubbling through me after I pushed a button which punched into me the next tot of that wonderful elixir. I stared at her mournfully, unable to perform the gassy deed which would help get me discharged from hospital. And also maybe because I just have a thing about not breaking wind in front of women. Except for my wife. There’s no way anyone can keep their gassiness a secret for very long once you’re intimately living together with a partner. Early in the morning, roosters cockle doodle doo, men’s backsides heartily crackle, women pretend they can’t but my God they can. That’s just the nature of things.

Some hours later a team of doctors and surgeons were leering down at me as if I were some prize discovery, poked me a bit and oohed and aahed over the diminishing wrinkles on my (proudly almost flat) tummy. Yesterday’s emergency operation was proclaimed a success. “Crikey,” one male doctor clucked to a female one from behind his clipboard in that delightful kiwi accent with the “g’day mate” clucky sound. “ ‘E’s lost in excess of fifty kilograms in four months, ’e has.” “No, no,” I corrected with a slight slur, “it was over about seven months,” tapping into my body a bit more of that bubbly called morphine, all at the touch of a button on my wrist. Marvellous stuff, I thought, mind drifting off on a magic carpet. They should really consider putting a generous dash of morphine in a new Johnnie Walker label. Make it the Platinum label.

“Still, that’s really amazing weight loss,” the male doctor rejoined. “You’re in bloody fine shape for 47, good on yer mate.” The way he said it amid the other chirpy praises from his colleagues I felt all I needed now was a vigorous slap on the bottom as they hoorayed me onto some rugby field.

Then the doc glanced over at my catheter pipe trailing from my groin under my blanket into a container. “But we need to get you farting mate, then we can look at pulling that catheter out of you. Get you home to your missus.” I winced at the thought of that bloody pipe being yanked out of a most prized possession and involuntarily crossed my legs. A solemn silence fell among the doctors and I felt this was due to the (unintended?) relationship made between removing the catheter pipe from my willy and a warm domestic homecoming. It was just a tad improper. But I suppose, having never stayed in a hospital since childhood, I didn’t know how earthy people can be in hospitals, maybe especially kiwi hospitals.

Okay, some context. I had been strolling around the library here in Glenfield, New Zealand, when I felt a strange pain in my stomach. Soon I was sprawled on a chair, gasping for breath, nauseated by the weird pain. I looked at my tummy and saw that my “benign” small umbilical hernia had disappeared.

What’s an umbilical hernia? I have recently lost in the space of about eight months well over fifty kilograms (written about here). People literally can no longer recognise me. Obese people — and boy, denial overcome, I most definitely was — can develop a benign umbilical hernia, a small section of bowel pushing out and forming a bubble just above the navel, due to the accumulation of fat. I was advised the bit of bowel would re-incarcerate as I lost all the weight. Mine sort of re-incarcerated that day but caused agony because the bowel had somehow twisted. I nearly passed out and threw up as I was rushed to hospital for an immediate, emergency operation. The angry, red thing bulging above my navel swelled as I lay in the emergency room being prepped for the operation. The protuberance on my tummy now literally looked like one of those baby monsters from the Alien movies which then hatches out the human body and scampers off screeching into another part of the spaceship. I panicked. Death was near. If that bloated bit of crab-like intestine burst … no more articles on Thought Leader and NewsTime.

Eyes rolling, I clutched the surgeon’s arm for dear life as he reassured me, “we do this every day. We just cut you open, check the intestine is not gangrenous or bad in any way, pop it back in, sew you up”. Childlike, I held onto his shoulder, sobbing, “I am scared”.

“I know,” he said calmly. “But don’t worry. This is a simple procedure.” By then a nurse had jabbed a morphine drip into my arm and the drug started to cocoon me.

“Here’s your missus,” the doc said, “I’ll leave you for a minute with her.”

Marion stepped in, eyes wide with fright as she saw me. I immediately remembered what a passing-by stranger said were my father’s last words after he collapsed on a street and lay there while an ambulance came. Please, I don’t want my wife to see me … not like this. And I didn’t want Marion to see me like this because I hated seeing fear in her teddy bear eyes, or feeling her helpless hands gently wiping the sweat off my forehead as they did now: hands that had often soothed me, cooked meals for us, beat me at card games while she cackled gleefully and I cursed.

The doc was right; they just popped the bowel back in and the whole team came and congratulated me the next day. But the gas thing was all so bloody important to them to check my bowels were working. It was weird to have pretty nurses asking me directly, “have you farted yet?” Cocky and naughty as I can be, I seem to be somewhat conservative in that area. But after nearly three days in which my stomach did absolutely nothing, I suddenly felt that delightful expansion in my nether regions. Dramatically I let it build up whilst my nurse finished filling up my catheter bag which she would then take away. Then I lifted a leg and let rip with gusto and with a wicked grin. From the beds around me there were encouraging mutters like “good on yer mate,” and “I’m your witness — I’ll testify,” because the other patients knew my plight. Open-mouthed and blushing, the nurse turned around, giggled and cried, “That’s awesome!”

Instead of embarrassment I felt a weird pride. Then my stomach really woke up as obviously there had been a large accumulation of methane etcetera. In terms of freedom of speech I have never had so much to say in my life.

But I could have died. Especially if the intestine had burst while I was still on the way to the hospital. I didn’t see my life pass in front of me. I thought about my Marion quite a bit as I writhed and sobbed. It was a tremendous wake-up call. It also reminded me that humour can help keep ourselves, or certainly our egos, in humble perspective; there’s just something so miraculously earthy about us all. And that, as important as each of us is, paradoxically we are also not that important: here today, easily gone tomorrow, and all too often soon forgotten, if remembered at all.