I can imagine this.
A younger man is in an airport, with plans and enough confidence. A baby is screaming.
The man is now pained; he needed to make a call, and cannot move because he has papers spread out all over his lap. The baby is having severe stomach cramps--the equivelant pain of being cut across the stomach with a sharp knife. The baby thinks she's being attacked--from the outside or inside is not a thought. The only thought is that it hurts.
Quick hop from imagination to potentially linked truth:
Day six of fighting the Beast in the Belly has taught me to be cautious about praising a product too quickly. The pink chewies from Rexall didn't help me at all (this is for a stomach bug with cramping and the other thing but not nausea, or very little, and only at the beginning). The Kaopectate pills work great, for about 8 hours. Then it's like your body says, "Get that sh** out of here," (naww mean?) and finally, Imodium functions great to keep you off of the commodium, but none of the above (nor pain meds) have calmed the stomach cramping.
A week of this is too much.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd start with Imodium and skip the rest. It's exhausting. No sleep. Dehydration. There is a very palpable weakness. It's tiring my hands typing right now. My other medical conditions that are painful are somehow slightly disconnected, like I'm too flat-lined to fully process all the pain signals. Everything is confusing and annoying. Sometimes when I think about very remote possibilities, I figure if I'm paying for something I did in the past or some past life, I must have really done it up right. This is no plea for sympathy, as I find that embarrassing and emasculating, to a degree. It's almost a prideful moment, like telling a war story.
I like telling stories through writing, so a war story it will be; here's a drama based on a true story...
It must have been the summer of 2014. I was no stranger to frequent runs to the bathroom on occasion. Far as I knew, that was normal for people to have a few times a year, or sometimes more.
But this time was different.
It started with the cramps--you know, the jellyfish-like motion your stomach starts making when it has business to take care of in a hurry. It's your 3-minute warning, mostly. And my alarm was ringing right across the country side. My commander, Mother Nature, had called me, and ordered me to report to the Port of Porcelain.
It was in that port that I spent the better part of the next six days (at least). My ass developed a horseshoe-shaped bruise in the perfect shape of a toilet lid. My asteroids were a blazing, burning red after a few days there.
At times, it was like pure rainfall. At other times, it was like wet clay mortars going off just below me. I won't lie--I was frightened, as I had no back-up. I was tempted on several occasions to flee the Port of Porcelain without clearance, but then I realized that the result might be peace of mind for me, but it would make a mess for the locals, so I kept my post, and I ruled my throne like a slightly-overweight, exhausted elephant seal, flopping around, reaching in what became a routine between toilet paper, books, and the bathtub rim to brace myself for the larger bombs.
As time went on, the bombs stopped and the rains were constant. It was all wrong. My energy was gone, and I mean the kind of gone like after a football game that goes to overtime. You have no legs. You have no will. You aren't even that interested in survival; it's something you half-heartedly hope will happen passively, without any effort on your part, because you have no effort left to give. After that sixth day, when PTSD and really, the older fashioned "shell shock" had set in, there was a certain comfort. It's a strange comfort, not a good comfort--one like you'd feel if you knew you were going to die in ten minutes and had a thought about paying taxes. That kind of comfort. I survived. I can die now, sure, but I survived something I shouldn't have, and doesn't it feel great to have been measured so directly and viciously by General Mother Nature, who expected you to fall in battle--doesn't it feel good to be able to crawl out of it and give her a nod, even if you knew you would die just after.
She knew, from experience, that I would not sleep... that all of my current physical ailments would be magnified at first, and then almost irrelevant later--more like a decoration I carried as I dealt with the real pain she had brought down. She knew I would eat fried foods and dairy and things that would make the war worse, but maybe she's not just an evil bitch--maybe she wanted me stronger. She tends to favor the stronger ones.
I began to wonder; "Mother Nature hasn't really created this body and mind of man very well if such small wars can render him entirely useless instead of just partially useless like I was. She knew that my over-exposure to the town surrounding the Port would create familiarity which breeds contempt, and that lack of sleep and presence of new pain would compound the psychological component."
My realization is that mankind is, if he should continue long enough for this phase to matter, a seriously under-developed work in progress. Denis Leary said happiness comes in small doses; it's a cookie, a cigarette, a 5-second orgasm. That means the rest of life is either uneventful or painful, and who needs that? I'm fighting your little war, Mother Nature, ma'am, but just to prove to myself I can do it because I can think of a thousand ways to die that would be less unpleasant than this.
And as for this thing in my stomach that I'm almost certain is at least the size of a midget alien, I'm going to cut it out and beat it to death with yardstick just to prolong its suffering.
