Constipation and Other Pressing Matters

When I was eight years old, I spent a summer with my two very proper, never-married great aunts, Aunt Nora and Aunt Melinda.  My parents went away for July and August, doing missionary work in Mwanza, a town in western Tanzania on the shore of Lake Victoria.  Aunt Nora and Aunt Melinda took me to their summer cabin in the Catskills.

The cabin had a tiny toilet right off the kitchen.  Aunt Nora would often spend a half hour or longer in the toilet, and it puzzled me.

One afternoon, while Aunt Melinda and I played double solitaire at the kitchen table, Aunt Nora went into the toilet and didn’t come out.  She just didn’t come out.  The door and walls were thin and you could hear that nothing was going on.  The only sounds were the flap and slap when Aunt Melinda and I flipped our cards over, and a bucketful of birdsong off in the woods.

“Aunt Melinda,” I asked, “Why does Aunt Nora spend so much time on the toilet?”

Aunt Melinda, the more ladylike of the two, paused, then said, “Constipation.”

“Constipation?  What’s that?”

Another pause.

Then Aunt Melinda replied, “Constipation an amalgamation of two other other words:  constantly and patient.”

We resumed playing cards.

A moment later, Aunt Nora opened the toilet door a crack and said, “It’s not so much constantly patient as constantly pushing.”

Melinda’s face flushed, but Nora’s toilet didn’t.

When I learned I had Parkinson’s disease, I did my due diligence and read that constipation was one of the outcomes of PD.  (Wait – that doesn’t sound right.  Constipation happens when things don’t come out, so how could it also be an outcome?  Well, it’s something you learn about if you do due diligence. Or should I say doo-doo diligence?)

At any rate, I had one bout with constipation, then went on the offensive.  (If this blog post is starting to sound offensive to you, feel free to “log” off!)  I went to the supermarket and bought prune juice.  It gave me a tinge of embarrassment, as if everyone in the supermarket was looking at me and visualizing my poop problems.

The thing about prune juice is that it’s highly caloric.  It creates a damned-if-you-don’t, damned-if-you-doo-doo scenario.  Drink the nectar, have lovely bowel movements, but your belly expands from the added calories.  Don’t drink the juice, and you become bloated for a different reason.

I soon switched over to flax seeds, which have additional health benefits.  Not only do they keep you from becoming constipated, they protect against cancer and heart disease.  I added a few spoonfuls to my morning oatmeal and enjoyed the added crunch.

But here’s the thing about flax seeds:  they’re delightful in your mouth and going down your throat, but when they exit the posterior opening of the alimentary canal, they wreak havoc.  Everything comes out gloppy, and you keep discovering individual flax seeds in your butt hair for days.

So now I’m back to prunes.  I buy them in packages labeled “Dried Plums,” a marketing ploy that staves off potential embarrassment.  I eat five or six every morning at breakfast, and guess what?  My plumbing’s fine!  Thank you, plums!  I just need to spend more time on my gym’s treadmill to burn off the calories.  Which, actually, is a good thing.

Case closed!

Here’s the real background on the word constipation.  It is an amalgamation, from the Latin com– (“together”) and stipare (“to cram, pack”).  It was first used to refer to packed bowels in the 1540s.  Which makes you wonder if before then people had so much fiber in their diet, and so much physical exercise in their daily life, that the condition was unknown.

Note:  The brown sun image comes from NASA’s website.  The complete caption:  “The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured its 100 millionth image of the sun on Jan. 19, 2015. The dark areas at the bottom and the top of the image are coronal holes — areas of less dense gas, where solar material has flowed away from the sun. Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/LMSAL.”  

Sounds like another gooey mess to me!