I had a rash all over my butt when it happened. Two weeks. Only went away slowly when I took off that god-damn lead apron I made in a hurry. Probably didn’t wash the Sulfuric acid off the battery plates good enough. The diarrhea stayed with me though, for a month at least. I wrote it down each day, you know, the details, color, amount, etc. Wonder if I can find that book…
I still say it was from the river. I was swimming there, in the Susquehanna about a dozen miles downstream when I heard about the accident on somebody’s car radio parked up on the bank. He left in a hurry.
A lot of people evacuated. I thought about it too, but hell, being stuck in a traffic jam, dribbling all over the car seat, probably throwing up out the window as the radiation got worse. Not that I didn’t puke enough staying at home. Mostly on the lawn, even though I tried to stay indoors, especially after the reports of a hydrogen gas buildup in the containment building. Looked like pizza after a turn or two in a blender. I’d post the pictures except that this was before digital cameras and scanners. Oh yeah, and the internet. In those days if you needed to know more about prolapsed hemorrhoids you had to call somebody, which was embarrassing. Or do what I did; signed up for a mail-order course from, in my case, Texas Medical Institute. Course I missed the whole section on the anus and the rectum while the meltdown was happening. So I had to kinda ‘solve’ the painful, itching symptoms at least, using another homemade device. Which I won’t go into. TMI, you know.
Wu: Eeew. Gross!
Js: Yeah, a pretty shitty way to heat water, I say.
Wu: No, I mean the asshole part.
Js: Yeah, I’m not sure that Texas Institute is even accredited.
Wu: You don’t get it bud, do you?
Js: Get what? There’s a lot of important historical information here…
Wu: One could even call it ‘too much’.
jxsolberg 
My God. This sounds like hell.
@tjordanm – Well, only parts of it are true, which is my style here. Mostly it’s just an elaborate play on the ‘ownership’ of the initials “TMI”I always find it amusing, the search results one reads after an ambiguous query.But I *was* 15 miles downwind from the doomed core during the entire event. Made me who I am today, ha?
You won my heart with your account of puking etiquette. And the risks you took! More puking on the lawn and less indoors at all costs – that’s my motto. Or one of my mottos.
That’s too much of all kinds of things…not just information.
Simple enough to solve. If you have a rash on your butt, stop getting your tobacco fix from urinals and change to a pipe.What did you expect after swimming in a river with an unpronounceable name? You should have tried our local river which has an exciting new name: Contaminated. I really must look the new name up to see what it means. In the meanwhile, I’m sure my skin peeling off has nothing to do with my morning dips. I had a problem around the nether regions once and hesitated to say exactly where to a lady doctor. She suggest “rectum”? I replied “well, it didn’t do ’em any good”.
Please tell me your “..homemade device..” did not lead to the Organic HTML patent application (Organic Hemorrhoid Treatment Method by Luffa); The diagrams were, ah, interesting, like comic panel interpretations of fibrous intergalactic craft docking to genetically designed, undernourished, grown-in-place, Gallus-gallus descended, space-stations. (The Oxford comma is not dead, it just smells that way)
@ordinarybutloud – Yes, like too many ‘TMIs in one post. Which was intentional, indeed the only point. My toches is superbly sound since birth.
@Lovegrove – Haha. I like that story. / And I should know better than to write believable-sounding fictions. I’ll get a Leper’s badge, deserved or not.
@chromepoet – Oy, I admit, there was no device, no apron, no regurgitation, and to believe the Three Mile Island operators, no danger to the public. All in all, scary times for this kid though. I’d already put my albums in piles for various survivors before it was over.I love commas, semi-colons, and colons. Oops, can’t seem to shake this proctophilia conceit.Anyway, I go with Oxford on alternate posts, hedging my bets.Many thanks for the read, as usual./JS
@dirtbubble – Hey thanks for the Rec. I’m sure we agree on a wide range of etiquittes, having both learned to suffer with grace and tact in equal measures.
@jsolberg – Did you hear about the leper poker player? He threw his hand in.
Nothing like a little sulfuric acid to get a something mean and nasty going.
Smells like rotten eggs to me.
@elgan – Aha! Twelve points for a ‘time-bomb’ comment, so reminiscent of Duncan. I was already clicked out and half asleep when I realized that you had coyly mixed the two chemicals I mentioned in the post. Nice one.
If diarrhoes stays with you for a month you aren’t scrubbing hard enough. I’m just saying.
TMI….ha,that is just funny and clever, you made me laugh,I remember the TMI disster well,we had to stay inside and I hated that I did sneak out ,climbed on the roof and down the trellis,why my folks ever had a trellis is beyond me all we did was use it to escape. Thank God I bypassed the shits….that time! (TMI)