Plip!

Warning: This post contains graphic descriptions of horrible things happening to male plumbing and is not for the squeamish. Although most of them probably bolted from this blog long ago. - The Management

Wednesday, July 21^st, 2004 dawned like any other day. Like I'd know. I slept until about 11AM that day, one of the benefits of being a contract employee and working from home at the time. I gave myself a shove out of bed, picked myself up off the floor, and Mimi my cat and I stumbled into the bathroom for our morning ritual. This ritual consists of me doing the expected manly things and Mimi brushing her teeth.

She really does this, God bless her. During our time together she has taught herself to brush her teeth on two toothbrushes I keep for this very purpose on a holder attached to the bathroom wall above the sink. She'll stand by the bathroom door as I'm getting out of bed, then when I reach the door she hops up on the toilet then up to the sink and brushes her teeth. Hygienic cat that she is, she brushes on both sides, which is why there are two toothbrushes there. I recorded a short movie of her doing this which I'll post here sometime if you don't believe me. Really.

And by the way, if you have ever been my lover and stayed overnight at my place, neither one of those toothbrushes is the one I let you use. Promise.

But I digress. On that day as I staggered toward the kitchen to make coffee, I seemed to notice a weird feeling in my back. This feeling can best be described as intense crippling hellish pain. I made it as far as the couch then sat down. My back hurt so bad that tears were literally leaking out of my eyes as I sat there shaking. It isn't very often that I regret living alone but this was definitely one of them. My brain would absolutely not work because of the pain and I had no idea whatsoever about what I should do in this situation. Finally, after the shock wore off enough for me to think a little, I called the clinic where my physician practices and had her paged. I told them it was “urgent,” a word I don't use lightly when calling clinics. She answered after a minute or so, thank God, and I explained that my back hurt so much I couldn't straighten up and in fact I could barely move. She could hear my voice break as I talked to her over the phone and asked if I could make it to the clinic. I said that I could, somehow.

So I called a cab and made the driver take me to the clinic. After a short wait my doctor saw me, looked me over and gave me an injection of some painkiller that thankfully worked pretty quickly, although subjectively it seemed like it took hours. Eventually we got an x-ray back and she showed me that I had a kidney stone.

My doctor, who I like, respect and trust absolutely, told me that the pain of a kidney stone in transit is probably the worst pain I'll ever experience in my life. She said that, while she herself had never had one, female patients of hers that had said that childbirth was nothing compared to a kidney stone. “Cool, no more 'you think that hurts, try delivering a baby' shit from women,” I thought to myself. Actually, I didn't really think that then, it was only weeks after the pain was over that I realized I could gloat about how badly it hurt.

My doctor explained to me that what would happen would be that, without intervention, the stone would make its way down my ureter to my bladder, then travel down my urethra, through my penis and eventually end up in the toilet bowl. This news was not greeted by me with anything even remotely resembling joy. “Jesus Christ! How long will that take? Is it going to hurt like this the whole time?” My doctor patiently¹ told me that it was difficult to say how long it would take, but probably a week or two, and no, it wouldn't hurt like this, it would get worse. Great. She said she could refer me to a specialist who could do something about it or we could just let the fucker rip its own merry little way right through my viscera until its dramatic debut into society. She already knew what I would say because she knew I had no health insurance, and she was right – I had to pass it (this is the approved phrase for letting it eventually shoot out the end of my cock like a 9mm copper-jacketed hollowpoint). She gave me a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket full of decent painkillers, patted me fondly on the hinder and sent me home to whimper like a three-year-old.

The next ten days were hell. I could eat a handful of painkillers (actually they weren't so much painkillers as paindaintilyslapitinthefacers) every four hours, and after three and a half hours I'd start staring at the clock. Every four hours for ten days, waking or “sleeping.” My doctor, bless her heart, would call me on my cell phone every couple of days on her way home from work to check on me. I didn't know doctors did that. I certainly appreciated it as you might imagine, because I didn't leave the house or even talk to anyone else the whole time.

On the tenth day or so, the pain went away. I hadn't passed the stone. I knew this because, on my doctor's advice, I put the strainer I use used for spaghetti into the toilet bowl and pissed into that for the whole time. No stone. A pretty gross and rusted spaghetti strainer when all was said and done, but no stone. My doctor eventually told me that the stone had reached my bladder, taken a look around at the lovely scenery and decided to set up camp there for a while. “For how long?” was the obvious question on my part, said with some trepidation after having survived such a ghastly ordeal. “Can't say -- a day, a week, a month, a year, forever – who knows?” was the answer.

So that's the story of my kidney stone. Part one, that is. We now move ahead in time to yesterday, which makes for an awkward sentence but you get the idea.

For about a week or two prior to yesterday, I had been experiencing odd twinges of pain when I urinated. Now as a gentleman in his middle years that has had numerous prostate problems as well as a bewildering assortment of STDs lovingly donated by various sexual partners, I didn't think too much of this nasty sensation. I didn't like it, mind you, but I didn't panic. Being the sensitive hothouse flower that I am, by now I am inured to most of the pain life dishes out. I figured if the “discomfort” continued or (God forbid) got worse I'd just go to my clinic and say “Doc, sorry, you have to stare into Big Jim's² one unblinking eye yet again, he's got himself a boo boo.” Although to be honest I must confess that occasionally the “why does it hurt when I pee?” movie that they showed us in sixth grade would decide to screen itself in my overactive imagination for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time I would once again blanch with terror in exactly the same way I did in sixth grade.

But it only crossed my mind once or twice that maybe, just maybe, it could be the dreaded KIDNEY STONE from a couple years ago opening the door of his double-wide trailer in my bladder, yawning, stretching, and saying, “Jeepers! I'm starting to go stale. I need some excitement in my life. Maybe I'll just see what this Urethra Trip is like that I've heard so much about.” Every time this scene played out in my mind, however, I would quickly kick the stone's ass back into his trailer, slam the door, then wrap about a hundred thick steel chains around the double-wide and quit thinking about it.

Silly me.

Yesterday morning as I was taking a piss I seemed to notice a weird feeling in my dick. “YEOW! ¡COÑASO! MOTHERFUCKER!” I screamed bilingually, in case there was a Latino five blocks away that didn't quite get that I was suddenly in horribly intense pain. Mimi came rushing into the bathroom, thinking that at last a giant mouse had emerged from behind the shower curtain and she could quickly bat it to death and save my life by risking her own and in gratitude I would spend the rest of my waking hours popping Tender Vittles into her mouth as she lay sprawled on her back on the bed. This has been her dream since she was a kitten. Even through the intense pain I could read the disappointment in her face as she saw it was simply Dad holding his crotch and screaming obscenities. Again.

My kidney stone was indeed back, and it really hurt. To illustrate, let us perform a simple experiment:

1. Go find a softball.

2. Somehow stick about a dozen finishing nails in it so it looks like a porcupine.

3. Wrap the softball assembly from step (2) in barbed wire.

4. Attach four or five rusty razor blades to the softball assembly, sharp edges facing outward. (This step is not strictly necessary, but it adds some verisimilitude to the experiment so I include it here.)

5. Tie a string around the softball assembly, leaving a two foot length of string dangling.

6. Run the dangling length of string through a soda straw.

7. Pull the softball assembly through the soda straw.

Both the above process and the end result – the shredded soda straw – strongly resemble the process and the end result of the kidney stone making its transit through my penis. At least that's what it felt like. To tell the truth, this happened recently enough that I can't even write about it anymore, it's still too vivid in my mind.

So this unimaginably intense pain goes on for about twenty minutes and then stops. “Twenty minutes?” you ask yourself. “That hardly seems enough time for a kidney stone to make its way through the immense Hulles cock I've heard so much about and even seen purported videos of on YouTube. What's happening here?” Well, I'll tell you, and thanks for asking by the way. In my many years on this earth I have found two things that make a man's dick try to invert itself and become a sort of poor man's vagina, to mangle a metaphor beyond all recognition: 1) being immersed in icy cold water, and 2) having the above-described softball assembly passing through it. It seems that my penis, being the straightforward and sensible guy that he (usually) is, decided all on his own that if he shrunk as small as possible this incredible pain would go away that much quicker. Smart cock, I have to say. [Note to self: big reward for penis after I'm done writing this.]

Unfortunately for me, however, the pain had ceased merely because the kidney stone had traveled as far as it cared to. It stopped right in the tip of my cock and would venture no further, the coward. “No way,” it said to itself. “It's nice and warm in here, if a little cramped, and it looks to be a very cold and very wet destination if I continue on as I have been going.” So it took a breather, right at the extreme end of my penis.

I know this because after the pain went away I went “Whew! Thank God that's over!” and grabbed my dick for a reality check. “YEOW! etc. “ (see above). It only hurt when I squeezed the tip of my penis, though. So of course every twenty minutes I said to myself “This didn't really happen, I imagined the whole thing,” and squeezed the tip of my penis. “YEOW! etc.” once again. Twenty minutes go by. “Hah, it was all a bad dream, my beleaguered brain is still pissed about finding the Downy coupon in my mouth is all.” “YEOW! etc.”

Eventually I got a little bit smarter, hard as it might be to believe. I went into the kitchen, dumped the remainder of my bottle of generic Ibuprofens into my mouth, washed it down with the special bottle of Ripple that I'd been saving in case some woman ever came over again, and proceeded to drink six 16-oz. glasses of tap water. Back pressure is the key here, I thought.

Funny thing -- for once I was right. After about an hour and a half of periodically subjecting myself to the aforementioned reality checks, I had to take a piss really badly. I put this off for as long as I was able (“Pain bad. Pleasure good. Absence of pain to be sought if pleasure not available.”) but finally could wait no longer.

It turns out that the saying “there are no atheists in foxholes” is true. I actually prayed that somehow magically one of my stupid ideas would finally pan out and this hell on earth would end. Against all odds, someone must have been listening and felt sorry for me. At any rate, I urinated and Plip! I heard a little noise as some tiny object hit the toilet water.

I cannot tell you how happy I was to hear this Plip! Words fail me. This tiny little noise sounded even better to me at the time than “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC does when I'm drunk. Which is saying a lot. I ever so carefully squeezed the end of my long-suffering penis and IT DIDN'T HURT! Yippee! I ran out of the house yelling “It doesn't hurt when I pee! It doesn't hurt when I pee!”

It must have been a woman who called the cops; any man would understand my elation at the fact that the stabbing pain in my cock was gone forever. But who cares. I can do jail time standing on my head if no one is sticking really sharp needles into my dick. Piece of cake.

The one thing that bums me out about all this is that I did not have enough foresight to grab the spaghetti strainer for The Revenge of the Kidney Stone. After the event I searched the toilet bowl in vain for the little fucker. I wanted to at least photograph it and post a picture on this blog for all of you to see and admire, but to no avail. Actually, if you promise not to tell anyone, what I really wanted to do was take the stone, wash it (duh), and make an earring out of it. The stone and I had been through a lot together, and while it would be exaggerating to say that I missed it, I did feel that something that was so intensely part of my life for a short while deserved more than an unmarked watery grave. I was even mentally prepared to field the inevitable question that people would ask me for the remainder of my life (“Why do you have a softball with nails, barbed wire and razor blades in your ear?”) but alas, the stone deserted me and fled down the sewer all on its own. I guess it didn't feel comfortable with the publicity or something, who knows. At least I was able to immortalize it today in this blog with words, if not with pictures. And lucky you, you get to read about it.

Okay. Done talking about my cock now. What did you do yesterday? Oops, sorry, gotta go.

-- Hulles

1Dang, I'm starting to get good at this writing stuff.

2Do gay men ever give their penis a girl's name? “The other day Gloria got caught in my pants zipper, boy did that hurt!” I'll have to ask Tarantino the next time I see him.