I spuddle.

I was driving along yesterday eating jellybeans, as one does when one is driving, when all of a sudden, I choked.  On a jellybean.   Among the things I didn’t do were a) stop or b) die.   I kept choking until I was coughing so hard that I thought for sure I was going to cough up both the jellybean and a big chunky piece of fresh lung.   Honestly, my biggest (and most misguided) concern was what I would do with the lung chunk.   Take it to the hospital?   Throw it out?

All the while, I was scanning passers-by and wondering which one I would ask to help me if it got to the point where I HAD to have help.   None of them looked like good candidates.   Too young or too old or too angry-looking and then I thought, Well, that’s fine because really what could they do to help me?  I’ll probably die anyway, clutching my lung chunk and a bag of jellybellies left over from Valentine’s Day.   I guess I was driving too slowly because the car behind me began honking and veered around me in an alarming way because OH I’M SORRY TO HOLD YOU UP BY SLOWING DOWN WHILE I CHOKE TO MY DEATH ON A COCONUT FLAVOURED JELLY BELLY.  MY BAD.

But!

I didn’t die!  So that’s the good news part of this story.   The bad news is that I coughed so hard that my back went into spasm.   The really good news is that I can cough so hard that my back goes into spasm AND not wet myself!  Which means that I have awesome bladder control, which is actually true in multiple ways.   When I choked on the jellybean, I was on my way to see Dr. Jon Stewart, my gynecologist.   For reasons that I won’t totally disgust you with, I had to undergo bladder testing to see exactly how awesome I was at holding urine and as it turns out I have “exceptional” bladder control.   Exceptional!   (I’m going to find someway to work that into my biography because honestly, I have very few boxes on my report card that are marked “exceptional”.)

In a semi-related-but-not-really-train-of-thought, I will also say that the last person you want to run into out-of-context is your gynecologist, who I bumped into in the school corridor that very same morning.  I like my gynecologist just fine, but that’s just awkward.   When he says, “How are you?”, I assume he’s asking, “How is your vagina?” Even when he’s not.   He’s nice enough and he looks like Jon Stewart, so while he’s talking I’m always narrating the scene in my head and filling in with things like, “Jon Stewart looked concerned when I asked him about risks of bladder-knicking during surgery.   Jon Stewart assured me that in 2000 operations, he had knicked only two bladders himself.”

One day I will accidentally call him Jon Stewart and we’ll both be embarrassed, but for now I have “exceptional” bladder control AND I didn’t die choking on a jellybean on my way to the gynecologist.   So.

I drove away from the gynecologist, proud of my exceptional bladder and reassured by Jon Stewart about bladder knicking, and as I turned the corner, an elderly lady on the sidewalk tripped and fell in such a dramatic fashion that I actually just left my car in traffic and leaped out to rescue her, which mostly involved pressing tissues on all her bleeding spots, which were many.   As I sat on the sidewalk (with a couple of other passersby) holding the bleeding hand of this tiny, frightened lady, I had one of those moments filled with angst about the passage of time and about how fragile we all are (or become) and how one fall can really really really actually ruin your life when you are 81 and have just walked up the street with a pushcart so you can get milk and the big box of cereal for your husband who is the frail one in your relationship.   Only now YOU are being loaded into the back of an ambulance and suddenly maybe if luck isn’t with you, YOU are now the frail one and your frail husband will have to take care of you.   I weep.   I do.   It’s too much sometimes when I think about how fast life just goes by and how we start so frail and dependant and end that way, too, and in the middle we are meant to know what to do but mostly all we know how to do is apply pressure to bleeding and hope for the best.

Somehow I thought this anecdote was going to dovetail into my story about choking on the jellybean and not wanting to ask for help but actually it didn’t, so really it’s just two disparate events that happened to me yesterday and I think the takeaway for all of us is that I HAVE EXCEPTIONAL BLADDER CONTROL.

Filed under: Health, Miscellaneous