(this post is dated to may 29, 2021 because it describes events over that day. however, it was written on june 10, 2021)

so, after waiting patiently for several weeks, and running through every blood test i could imagine, i finally got some money in my account on the 29th of may and was able to get out to get a fit test to make sure i didn't have cancer – or prove that i did. however, it didn’t quite work out according to plan...

i wanted to take a nap on the friday afternoon, get up in the evening, make a big meal a little after midnight, get the fit test first thing in the morning, take a shit when i got home and then get it back by the end of the day. unfortunately, i ended up knocked out cold instead of having a nap, and it was something like 4:00 am when my body woke me up to pass a giant bowel movement. that’s a shitty turn of events, right?

i made something to eat before i left, and tried to make the best of it. when life gives you shit, you make shitonade - and enjoy it, with a shit-eating grin.

well, i got there and realized i didn’t have to pay for it until i brought it back. so, i could have picked up the test the night before, used my giant 4:00 am bowel movement and brought it in fresh, at 7:00 am. alas....

it was a cold morning, so i had my ski mask on, and i’ll remind people once again that, yes, i bike with a ski mask in the cold weather and, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with covid-19 or with religious observation. these masks are manufactured for use with things like snowmobiles, as it gets incredibly cold up here in canada and people need them to work or play outside when it does; i use them for biking even when it’s up to 10 degrees out, if the wind is pushing in from the north and creating a windchill effect. this was an unusually cold day for late may, but cold it was, and i was actually glad to have the protection as i struggled through the blizzard-like wind chill to get the things i needed done.

i went immediately from the first blood lab (“dynacare”) to my normal blood lab (“medical labs of windsor”), because the doctor had faxed them the requisition. this was a large requisition, and i expected to need to go to the other labs anyways, so i just asked them to take a few vials of things they could test for directly, which turned out to be vitamin k related items, and some issues related to my pancreas, which i wanted to check indirectly for absorption – inr, ptt, fibrinogen, uric acid, lipase & amylase. i then hit the grocery store for a first run of items and went home to try to take a shit and get it back before 14:00...

i’m actually relatively successful at urinating on command, but that could be a function of high coffee consumption. i’m not sure i’ve ever tried to force myself to defecate, and it’s not that i didn’t give it a good try, but after four hours of giving it my best, all i could get out were these hard little blobs. while a chemical analysis would be required to verify my suspicion, it would seem to me that i probably passed the iron i had swallowed right before i went to sleep the night (day) previously. and, you know what iron + carbon is, right? that’s right, it’s steel. so, these little steel nuggets were all i could conjure up, at 13:30 in the afternoon, and i had to act quickly to dip the applicator in and get it back at the very last minute.....

given these nuggets in front of me, should i have waited? well, i didn’t have a lot of experience with guessing the consistency of stool by observing it on wax paper; i had dogs growing up, and picked up after them occasionally, but that was a long time ago and i consequently had a strict deficit of recent experience in physically handling any sort of material passed from the anus of any living creature. so, it didn’t really cross my mind to pass on this one – i was just excited that i finally got something out and moved to quickly capture it, before it was too late.

i quickly broke the seal on the fit applicator – which was the point of no return – and pulled it out to notice that it....i realized the problem right away. i think i was expecting something with a pick at the top, or something vaguely serated, but it turns out that it was this plastic screw that wasn’t going to pick anything up unless it was dipped directly into stool that falls decidedly on the mushy side of the scale.

so, i tried to dip the applicator into my drying steely excretion and got nothing. it was like trying to cut into an acorn with a spoon – it was going nowhere. if i diced it up a little, i could get a piece of it off like i was picking something up with a toothpick, but it didn’t fit into the tiny hole for the applicator (which is a definite design flaw). shit.....

in the end, i tried to ram a little piece in and made like nike on my bicycle to the lab, where i dropped it off at the very last minute, hoping for the best but expecting the worst....