G.I.: A brief history of the weird battle raging inside me

Chapter 2

I ducked into the men's room, a cramped and smelly closet near the back of the bar, and spent the next fifteen minutes in the only stall cleaning myself up as best I could. What a buzz kill.

Fortunately, there was less quantity than I first feared, but I'd somehow managed to turn my briefs into a sopping mess.

What the hell?

When I finished cleaning the worst of it, I left a wad of clean toilet paper in my briefs so I could at least get back to my friends and walk home without the indignity of feeling my mistake at every step.

I was embarrassed and not a little curious. This had come up so suddenly. I wasn't prepared for it, not that anyone is. Sure, I'd had some stomach aches and I gulped more Maalox than was probably normal, but this was something altogether different.

I. Shit. My. Pants.

I made my apologies to Wayne and Pete, left the bar and walked the six blocks back to my apartment wondering what had happened. Maybe, I thought, I had just had too much to drink and misjudged a little. Maybe. I was twenty-three going on twenty-four and no one I knew had ever mentioned a problem like this. Perhaps they did have problems and, like me, just didn't want to talk about them over beer and wings.

The last time I'd had any trouble down there was the previous spring, not long after I returned from a trip to St. Thomas, the island in the Caribbean where my father lived at the time. Before I flew down, everyone said not to drink the water, but I did drink a little one hot night, and a week after I was back in New York, I shit up a storm. It wasn't bad enough to keep me out of work, but I became friends with a little brown bottle named Imodium. When the diarrhea passed, I didn't think much more about it.

As the summer progressed, though, I seemed to have lingering stomach issues. Stomach is a bit of misnomer. My problem was in my guts and that rarely-mentioned part of the human anatomy between one's stomach and ass.

It started as a rumbling and irregularity, as they might say in an evening-news television commercial, and turned into occasional diarrhea. I figured the stress of work was wearing on me. That and a sour relationship with my girlfriend that was nearing an end. Between the two, I had built up enough anxiety to require swigs from the Maalox bottle. When even that didn't help, I went to my doctor.

Dr. Piller, as I might call him, was a decent guy, trim, curly hair, in his late-thirties with a practice that always seemed busy and bustling. He was in with a few other general practitioners in a nondescript one-story building on Cortland's east side, not far from the county jail, a key source of his business.

When I'd gone to see Dr. Piller for lingering colds or other routine problems, he never hesitated to scribble his name on a script and send me off with a few pills to get me over it. When I went to him for what I thought was a urinary tract infection, he surprisingly opted to give me a rectal exam and told me my prostate was the size of baseball. I had to hand it to him. It sure felt that way when he probed it with his finger, the knuckles of which were large, suggesting he'd cracked them a lot as a kid.

"Ha!" he said, snapping off the latex glove he'd used to explore my stink. "I'm pretty sure you have prostatitis. That's a young man's disease!"

His laughter surprised me, though it was probably meant to ease my fears. After all, pink urine and a swollen prostate generally aren't the kinds of things doctors laugh at.

He wrote me a prescription for a course of antibiotics and obtusely suggested that I "clear the pipes" more regularly. I didn't ask what he meant by that because I didn't want to hear my doctor speak the words suggesting I masturbate or get laid more often.