September 25, 2023 by Amy
The Call of the Commode
There comes a time in every runner’s life (well, walker, in my case), where you are convinced you will crap your pants or be forced to leave a deposit on a neighbor’s lawn, because your bowels simply do not have the fortitude to make it back home in time to use your own toilet.
This has happened to me more times than I can count. It has also happened to my husband. Both of us have witnessed the undignified frantic dash of the other into the bathroom from the outside. Doors slam. Shoes are not discarded. Sometimes the light isn’t even turned on. (I do recommend hitting that fan switch, though, if at all possible.) I’ve even been known to utter a subhuman growl of distress. Or a howl of prayer to the heavens.
A runner friend of ours has confessed to the same horrific feeling, along with admitting he has actually had to stop and relieve himself. In the bushes. Of an unknown neighbor. Turns out that every runner I know has primary and secondary emergency shrubbery options lined out on their favorite routes. You know, just in case.
This is how it goes.
First, you must be at the furthest point from your house when your intestines start giving you a heads-up. “Hey, yeah, we’re gonna have to shit soon. Haha. Good luck getting back, asshole.” You tell yourself that you can make it. Everything’s fine. If you’re just starting to feel it now, you’ve got a good 20 to 30 minutes before feces come shooting from your body. This isn’t like colonoscopy prep. No problem. Maybe you pick up your pace a little. Picking up the pace does what, students? That’s right. It accelerates the urgency of your intestines. You are now in a race against your most formidable opponent: your gut.
As the pressure grows, you begin to hatch escape routes. Can you cut through backyards? Can you actually sprint without blowing out a knee? After five minutes or so, the situation increases in urgency and that’s when you start to scope out the shrubbery. You take into consideration: ambient light (has the sun risen yet?), house lights (yet another reason we should not be burning lights all through the night, folks, think of the dignity of your exercising neighbors), density of bushes, and distance of said bushes from roads and sidewalks. Is there enough cover for you to bare your ass? Is it dark enough that, should another runner happen by, you can stay still and quiet and they’ll never know? You tell yourself that you will not crap in someone else’s yard, that you have the strength and fortitude to gut it out. Your gut laughs at you, shakes its boggy head, and seizes up again. Your walk changes to a stiff gait intended solely to keep whatever is inside you there.
If you’re really lucky, your intestinal distress has pulled your attention away from your route, and suddenly you realize that you are hopelessly lost, in the dark, and further from home than you realized. An added insult is that it’s still so dark that you must pull out your phone and use a map app to determine just how far you are from your commode. The irony is that you’re in a subdivision with huge houses, any one of which probably has at least four toilets just sitting there empty. The windows are dark and all the sane people are in bed, mere feet from instant relief if needed.
This was me this morning. And this is when I realized that there was absolutely no way I was going to make it home. I was off my route and too far.
Time to phone a friend.
I swallowed my pride and called my husband, who I knew was exercising at home. “Yeah,” he answered somewhat breathlessly.
“Hey. Soooo…I got turned around in a subdivision and I’m about to crap my pants.”
“I’m on my way.”
This man, my hero, didn’t even ask where I was. He paused his workout, jumped in the car, pulled up my location on his phone, and tore off like a bat out of hell. I kept walking toward home and lo! My watch notified me that I had completed my goal of two miles! Excellent…I’m only .75 miles from home instead of heading up the driveway mere steps from my potty.
I watched an Amazon delivery driver pull up to a nearby house and walk a package to the door, the only other person out at that ungodly hour. He sauntered with the leisurely pace of someone who has already completed his morning constitutional. Bastard. And then I saw relief in the form of the bright headlights of a Lexus IS350 careening around a corner like Mario Andretti himself was behind the wheel. My chariot sped toward me and whipped around, the passenger door presented two feet away. My heart leapt in joy and my gut screamed, “Noooooo! Foiled again!”
My husband zoomed me home, slamming the car into the garage and announcing that he’d stay in and keep the headlights on for me for easier navigation in the dark garage. I sprinted inside and made it to the bathroom, barely. I heard him enter a moment later and yelled, “Thank you!” as he passed. “Yep,” he said, and then simply headed back to his workout.
My hero. My sweet, unquestioning, unwavering, knight in a gray sedan. Preserver of my dignity and my pants.
I bought baklava today, just for him. I won’t have any. All that sugar messes with my stomach.
Today’s image is a plant that I don’t know the name of but which I think looks suitable for this particular post.
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