Andy Borowitz - An Unexpected Twist

 

 

So, last fall, my wife Olivia and I are getting ready to go to a party, but I'm not really feeling up to it. I've been feeling crappy the last few days. I've had these weird stomach pains and bloated. I look like I'm in my third trimester. I've been constipated, which is weird for me, I've got to say. I just got to tell you this, I am very regular, okay? [audience laughter] I know that sounds like bragging. [audience laughter] But as we age, we wear that like a badge of honor, [audience laughter] so I just say that. 

 

So, Olivia calls the health insurance hotline that we've got and talks to a nurse, and she runs down my symptoms from the nurse. And then, the nurse asks her to ask me, “When was the last time that you passed gas?” I realized at this point that my record keeping on this is terrible. [audience laughter] So, she asks, “Well, was it in the last 24 hours?” And I think about it, and I'm like, “No, I don't think so.” And so, then the nurse says to Olivia, “You've got to get him to an emergency room within the next six hours.” 

 

So, we go to the emergency room, and we check in at the triage unit, which I've got to say, is not a reassuring name for a unit at all. [audience laughter] It's like the worst thing to call a unit, in a way. The intake nurse, first question she asked me is, she said, “Can you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?” And I say, “6,” which is a huge mistake. Because at that point, an immediate sense of calm and relaxation sets in over my case. They busied themselves with the people who said 7 through 10. That's just the way it works. 

 

So, it takes a couple of hours. They finally X-ray me, and I'm taken to an examining room, and a doctor comes in. And this doctor is 12. [audience laughter] I feel like I'm being waited on at the Apple store. [audience laughter] I've got this big belly, and I say to him, “Doctor--” [audience laughter] I say, “What's up with this?” And he says, “Well, my diagnosis is distention.” [audience laughter] And I said, “You mean my stomach is distended?” And he said, “That's correct.” And I'm like, “Well, clearly, I'm not dealing with Dr. House here, you know?” [audience laughter] But he orders a CAT scan, and I go through that. And then for the next couple of hours or so, a bunch of other doctors come into the room. 

 

Disturbingly, each time a new doctor comes in, he's slightly higher on the medical hierarchy at the hospital. So, I'm pretty sure the next person who comes in is going to be Hippocrates, [audience laughter] the Father of Medicine. But finally, a guy comes in with a CAT scan results, and he is a surgical resident. Now, the only word that's worse than triage is surgical, because you know that something bad is about to happen. He says, “Well, we have good news in a way, which is, we know what's wrong with you.” And I said, “Well, what is it?” And he says, “Your colon is twisted. And this is something called a sigmoid volvulus.” I know a lot of you already know what that means, since this is the scientists and all that. 

 

Basically what it means is that the colon has formed a knot, and nothing's going in and nothing's coming out. It's like midtown. [audience laughter] Now, my wife Olivia, is a former journalist. She has a knack for asking the perfect question that just gets right to the truth of the matter. So, she asks, “Is he in danger?” And the doctor says, “Yes.” [audience laughter] Now, I should probably say at this point that at this point in time, Olivia and I have been married for nine months. These have been the happiest nine months of my life. And just being with her has erased all the sadness of all the years leading up to this. And during those nine months, many times I've said to myself, “Life is so awesome right now. It would take something really freaky to fuck this up.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, I say to the doctor, “What's next?” And he says, “Well, we have two options. And the first option is one we'd rather not do,” which is, he said, “Emergency surgery. We go in, we cut out the part of the colon that's twisted, and then we sew the two ends back together. And the reason this is not a good option is because, as you can imagine, the colon is a very contaminated part of the body. When you do emergency surgery in those conditions, the chances of an infection and then sepsis setting in are pretty high, and that will kill you.” 

 

So, I said, “Well, what's the other option?” He said, “Well, the other option is that we take a colonoscopy tool with a camera on the end, and we just use it as a tool, and we stick it up your rectum, and we try to manually untwist your colon. And if this works, we will then spend the next couple days in the hospital just flushing out your system, getting your colon nice and sterile. And then, on Friday, we'll do that operation, but it'll be under sterile, optimal conditions, and you'll be good to go.” [audience laughter] So, I'm like, “Shove the camera up my ass. Let's go.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, they do it, and thank God it works. They untwist my colon. I check into the hospital. I'm in a room. They spend the next couple days flushing out my system, and by Friday, my colon is clean as a whistle. It's unbelievable. I go in for the surgery, and miraculously, the surgery goes exactly as planned. Perfect. So, I'm in my room and I'm recovering, and for the first time, I meet my surgeon who's to going perform this on me. He's a very nice gentleman named Dr. Ho. And Dr. Ho speaks perfect English, but he's chosen to speak it in this very abbreviated, clipped fashion, like Confucius on Twitter. [audience laughter] That's the only way I can describe it. Everything is like four characters, and then he's out. 

 

So, I asked him like, “So, when you got in there, what did you do to my colon?” And he said, “Remove two feet.” They took out two feet of my colon. And I'm thinking, that's a lot of colon to be removed. And I said, “Why so much?” And he said, “Colon was redundant.” [audience laughter] And that is the extent of my conversation with Dr. Ho. He's out. He's out to tweet some more to somebody else. [audience laughter] So, it's awesome. Olivia takes me home, and we're feeling like we really dodged a bullet. But then, I get home, and I'm not feeling so great. I'm feeling chills and shivers. I get into bed, and I pull up the sheets all the way to my chin, like I'm a little kid home from school. I'm feeling bad. 

 

Then I notice that every time I sit up, I vomit. This gets worse and worse until-- I know some of us vomit occasionally, but this is continuous vomiting. It's like, I've just seen a Matthew McConaughey movie or something. [audience laughter] It's just uncontrollable. And so, we know something is majorly fucked up. So, Olivia takes me back to the hospital, and we go back to the emergency room, and I get back to the triage unit, and the nurse there says, “Can you rate your pain from 1 to 10?” And I am like, “10, motherfucker,” [audience laughter] which turns out to be the correct answer, by the way, for future reference. 

 

So, they take my vitals. I am so dehydrated from all this vomiting that my heart rate at rest is like a 120. My blood pressure is just plummeting to the floor, and I'm in a state of dehydration, which is known as organ failure. My organs are now failing. So, they strap me to a gurney, they put an IV in me, they start pumping me with fluids. They thread a tube up my nose and down my throat to start pumping all the bile out of my stomach. And just quarts of bile are coming out of me. I'm on there, and they give me an emergency X-ray of my abdomen. And then, with the X rays, a few minutes later, Dr. Ho appears again. [audience laughter] He explains to me that when they sewed up the two parts of my colon, apparently somehow it sprung a leak. My colon is now currently leaking into the rest of my abdomen. They can identify gas in the vicinity of my liver, which is not really where it's supposed to be. 

 

And I say, “Well, so, are we going to do that thing where we flush out my body for a couple of days and then we get things nice and clean and then you operate?” And he said, “No, we don't have that option here. We've got to do emergency surgery.” Exactly what we were trying to avoid the last week, “Because this can kill you.” So, I can see Olivia has one of those journalistic questions coming on, but this time, she takes one of the residents outside of the room and asks this question out of my earshot. She comes back into the room, and I can see that there are tears in her eyes. I say to her, “Did you get some bad news?” And she just says, “I just love you so much.” And I'm like, “I am fucked.” [audience laughter] Like, “Just bring in the rabbi right now, because [audience laughter] I am so over. I am so over.”

 

But I can tell that she's really very upset and she's falling apart, and so, I call out for a nurse and I said, “Nurse, can we have a tranquilizer for my wife? She really needs something.” [audience laughter] But it's what the resident has told her, and she hasn't told me. The resident has said, “With this kind of surgery, the odds of surviving it are about 50%. That's about what you got.” So, they wheel me into surgery, and three hours later, magically, I awake. So, I know that I've somehow survived this. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

That's not exactly a spoiler I'm here, right? I mean, come on. [audience laughter] You weren't following this very closely. [audience laughter] All right. So, I'm recovering, and there again appears Dr. Ho. He explains to me what they've done to me, which is that they've wrapped up my colon where they think the leak was, and they wanted to make it absolutely tight. So, what they've done, they're taking no chances this time. They're going to give the colon a few months to heal. And the way they're doing that is they have diverted my digestive tract elsewhere. I’m like, “What is that? Like, “When you close the upper roadway on the GWB. I mean, what does this mean?” 

 

What this means is they have taken out part of my small intention. It is now currently emptying out into something called an ileostomy. Dr. Ho has literally torn me a new asshole. [audience laughter] So, I'm like getting this bad news. He says, he tweets to me, “Only three months. Only three months.” Then they do a reversal surgery at the end of three months, they put your small intestine back in, and you're good to go. So, we go home, we've got three months to live with this thing. I'm getting to the gross part. [audience laughter] I'm feeling like at this point that I've totally done a bait and switch on this poor girl. Because nine months earlier, when we got married, I was healthy and robust. And now, I'm totally broken down. 

 

I look at myself in the mirror, I have lost 25 pounds. I've got supermodel legs, and I look like a scarecrow. So, we go back to Dr. Ho. And now, we get the first good news of this whole story, which is, he says, “You have something called a prolapsed stoma. That means we have to move up your reversal surgery by a month.” So, I remember checking into the hospital, lying on the operating room table, and I'm about to go under anesthesia, and Dr. Ho is there, and he looks me in the eye, and he says the longest single sentence he's said to me since this whole thing began, he says, “Look, I know you've had a lot of complications with these first two surgeries, so I'm going to be extra careful this time. [audience laughter] You got to love that learning curve, you know? No more boozing up in the OR. We're going to focus. We're going to focus.” [audience laughter] 

 

Well, obviously, I made it. As some people of you have figured out, I made it. I survived. [audience laughter] I'm here. But before I go, I need to get to the part of the story where I tell you what life lessons my colon has taught me. I'm going to write a book about this called Tuesdays with my Colon, where I just [audience laughter] go over those life lessons. But here's the thing. I was always the kind of guy who went through life and said, “Life is precious, and you got to make the most of every minute.” But I've got to say, “You don't really believe that or know it or feel it until your life is almost taken away from you, and that is totally true.”

 

And so, now, what I do every morning when I get up, I do two things. I'm still in bed, I look out the window, and I look at the city, the beautiful city, and the sun coming up over the city, and I check that out, and then I look in the other direction, and I look at my beautiful wife sleeping next to me, and I realize at that moment that I've got today and I have everything. Thank you very much.