Well several people asked me to update this blog and I kept promising to do so. But before I do, here's something that helped put it in perspective. The subtext for this is an email that's been circulating and some woman named Sue entered her brother's email for a radio contest for "worst job ever" and with this entry she won:
Hi Sue,
Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit.
This time of year the water is quite cool. So here's what we do to keep warm: We have a diesel-powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temp. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a damn good plan, doesn't it? I've used it several times with no complaints.
When I get to the bottom and start working, what I do is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my neck and flood my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until my ass started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my itchy ass started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done.
In agony I realized what had happened. The hot-water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. This is even worse than poison ivy under a cast. I had put that hose down my back, but I don't have any hair on my back, so the jellyfish couldn't get stuck to my back. My ass crack was not as fortunate.
When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my ass. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communications system. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he and 5 other divers were laughing hysterically.
Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make 3 hellish in-water decompression stops totaling 35 minutes before I could reach the surface for my chamber dry decompression. I got to the surface wearing nothing but my brass helmet. My suit and gear were tied to the bell. When I got on board, the medic, with tears of laughter streaming down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to coat my ass when I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't shit for two days because my asshole was swollen shut.
We've since modified the equipment to filter out most sea creatures.
Anyway, the next time you have a bad day at the office, think of me. Think about how much worse your day would be if you were to squash a jellyfish on your ass. I hope you have no bad days at the office. But if you do, I hope this will make it more tolerable.
Original source: forwarded email in August 1999
Sound too bad to be true? Yep, an urban legend:
"You're absolutely right to classify this story as an urban legend. First off, if a commercial diver was working in cold water at depths requiring A 35-minute decompression time, he'd certainly use a drysuit which does not allow water to touch the skin. Second, the expense and pressures involved in pumping heated water down to the diver at such a depth would both be ridiculous. Third, the jellyfish would've been pulverized from the pump and the stew of stinging cells would have affected all sites of contact (i.e. all over the fellow's back), not just at one spot. Fourth, if the diver spent 35 minutes in safety stops and still had to spend time in a decompression chamber, he would have to have been incredibly deep and using mixed gases, which contraindicates hardhat diving. In short, it's a crock. Amusing, but a crock nonetheless."
Ok so how am I doing? My butt hurts. It hurts to sit. What do I do? Sit and talk to people all day. It's not as bad as that diver guy but certainly for a lot longer. Apparently I'm in the minority (but who knows?) of men who wound up with long-lasting pain after the surgery. Got up to about a 7 on a 10 point scale. Surgeons told me this and that, should go away any day, well, we've never seen it last this long, well never past 6 months, well we might have to "go back in there again." Don't think so.
So thanks to my old buddy and physical therapist Kathy White with backup from another friend Sara, I was told Donna Edwards at Mountain Spirit Physical Therapy was an expert in pelvic pain. Got a referral (no longer needed under the new open access law that says you can go straight to a physical therapist without a doctor's order) and went and have session #4 tomorrow. She's a wonderful woman. Fortunately another good friend Tracy gave me a "heads up" (hahaha) about what to expect and loaned me her TENS unit. The following paragraph is PG-13 and may be Too Much Info but I have a twisted sense of humor anyway. I'll clean it up.
So by now I've pretty much lost whatever modesty I had. Half of Knoxville has seen my bottom. One of the lovely things of prostatectomy is a persistent dribbling incontinence and I wound up getting a yeast infection from being wet all the time. Yes I am truly being "womanized" and so I call up my dermatologist after I can't clear it up (Desitin didn't work) and the helpful woman asked why I needed an appointment and I said "jock itch." She made an appointment. The same lady whom I guess is close to retirement age asked in person why I was there and must not have written it down the first time and I repeated "jock itch." So I see my dermatologist and in the middle of pulling my pants down and showing him my crotch and full frontal nudity, said matronly woman knocked on the door and came right on in. I just laughed. Now 50.1% of Knoxville has seen my bottom. So anyway that was a week or two before I saw the physical therapist and sign about 80 pages of forms and recalled reading in one page that pelvic floor therapy can be awfully uncomfortable and private and just to make sure there's no hanky-panky that the patient won't be alone. So in the middle of my first session the secretary (I am certain she has no LPN, RN or other medical initials after her name) comes in and stands in the corner. What does pelvic floor therapy entail? Well let's just say a glove and KY jelly are absolutely necessary. At this point I'm laughing. Up to 50.3% of Knoxville now can pick me out of a lineup of flashers. THEN at the conclusion (why not the beginning?) of the session I'm handed a form to sign that it's ok with me NOT to have a witness. In "hindsight" (hahaha) I guess I should have refused and made her secretary sit in each time and made some grunting noises or like that asshole Florida student cried just after he said, "Don't Taze me, bro!"
Ok, so now you know. Good news is I think it's getting better, strung together 2 days with no significant pain, can sit longer, and am cautiously optimistic about getting paroled from this pain jail. I talked to a guy who had his robotic surgery at Vanderbilt and had pain for 8 months and his surgeon's response was "well that happens sometimes."
The moral of the story is it really helps to be your own advocate and have good friends and resources. And as I tell my closest friends, "pray for my sorry butt." Thanks. I'm still able to find some things funny. Hope you do, too.
