In the play (and later movie) "Prelude to a Kiss," an old man
manages to enter the body of a beautiful young bride when
he kisses her, to the great consternation of the bridegroom
(who somehow KNOWS his new wife is different, and he's
right—she's now a grouchy old man in a beautiful young
woman's body!) When the old man is finally persuaded to
leave, his parting words of wisdom are: "Don't forget to
floss." Well, I have some hard-earned wisdom for YOU: Drink
lots of water!
I lived in New York City for many years, and during that time,
I always managed to stay slightly dehydrated. I didn't really
think about it—it was an automatic reaction to being out for
hours, taking subways and buses from chore to chore, while
confronting signs saying "Restrooms for Customers Only." I
would contemplate taking a long ride up an escalator to reach
the Ladies Room in a nearby department store—I knew where
these were in every store—but this could end up adding as
much as 45 minutes to an outing, plus there was always the
problem of being tempted by the merchandise! Public toilets
have always been a huge, unsolvable controversy in New
York. For instance, I remember when the city imported coin-
operated street toilets from Paris, only to find that homeless
people were sleeping in them.
In New York, we used to go to the opera—which we love
dearly—but an opera makes even a very long movie seem
short, especially when you take all the curtain calls into
consideration. The Soprano must be given a huge bouquet of
flowers and must then remove one and give it to the Tenor,
etc., while the audience claps and cheers continuously. At
that point I would be jumping up and down in my seat not
just from enthusiasm, but from needing desperately to pee,
but by the time I made it out to the lobby, the line to the
Ladies was a mile long. Whitley and I finally joined a club
(which cost an amazing amount of money), just so we could
use a special restroom set aside for members during the
intermission. I never thought it would be possible to pay so
much just to pee.
Pee stories abound. I remember once squatting down to
urinate in the Boboli Gardens in Rome (I was wearing a skirt
at the time), while pretending to be admiring the flowers.
Speaking of skirts, a woman once told me that after coming
back from Greece and experiencing the toilets there, she now
understood why Greek women do not wear slacks (she didn't
elaborate). A man I know who regularly takes his family to
visit his relatives in Italy once described a bathroom
there: "It was a beautifully tiled room with a hole in the
middle—and it wasn't a large hole, either," so there was not
only the problem of aim, there was the feeling of desecration
if he missed. I once heard that Ben Franklin's kidney stones
were so bad that he could only pee successfully while
standing on his head.
My particular pee story goes like this: I got up from the toilet
one day, turned around to flush and saw DARK RED. Obviously
I had a problem. I called my doctor and got a test, and he
sent me to the urologist who sent me to a surgeon who
specializes in removing kidney stones, who ordered more
tests, then set a date to remove them. It turns out my
stones were in the wrong place to be zapped by sonar, so he
would have to, as he said, "Go up your urethra with a laser
and shoot them into small pieces." Not wanting to criticize his
bedside manner, I declined to tell him that this sounded like a
scenario from "Star Wars."
I remembered the time that Whitley got a kidney stone. He
had been taking planes constantly while touring for one of his
books and hadn't drunk enough water. When he got home, he
woke up one morning in excruciating pain (he later said it was
the worst pain he'd ever experienced). I called EMS and he
was taken out of our apartment building on a STRETCHER and
whisked away to the nearest hospital, where they didn't even
have a bed for him (hospitals were very overcrowded at the
time), but deposited him on a gurney in the hallway. When I
went to see him, I noticed he was hooked up to an I.V. and I
thought, "This is going to be a LONG day, I'd better get some
breakfast," so I went across the street to a restaurant.
Before the waitress even had time to bring me my food, I
looked up from the table and there was Whitley, fully
dressed, and ready to go home. It turns out the hospital staff
was smarter than we'd given them credit for: they knew it
had to be a kidney stone and they also knew that all the fluid
that was being pumped into him from the I.V. was going to
cause him to pass it. Sure enough, pretty soon, he needed to
pee in the worst way, but no one had even left him a
bedpan, so he removed the I.V. from his arm, climbed off the
gurney, visited the Men's Room, went back to the gurney to
get his clothes and get dressed and then just left! He
never "checked out" because he'd never been "checked in."
I wasn't so lucky—my stones were not in a place where they
were likely to come out on their own. My first surgery date
went like this: I turned up at the hospital (after not having
eaten or drunk anything for 8 hours) with a bad case of
bronchitis that I'd caught on an airplane. I got into one of
those rear-end-revealing gowns and was lying down, ready to
be wheeled into surgery, when the anesthesiologist came in
and took one look at me coughing and sneezing away and
said, "Go home."
So I went to the doctor to get some help for my problem
(including some REAL cough medicine), and rescheduled the
surgery. This time, I passed the anesthesiologist's criteria, so
the operation was a "go." I fell asleep and woke up (almost)
stone-free. But then the excitement started: LA had an
EARTHQUAKE!
I remember lying on a gurney on the 7th floor, coming out of
the anesthesia and struggling to open my eyes, seeing a
nurse open a laptop computer on the counter of the nurses'
station and say, "It's a 5.8." Since I was lying on what was
essentially a bed on wheels, I didn't feel it and none of the
nurses were concerned, because the hospital was built on
rollers, so it just rocked harmlessly back and forth (although I
was certainly glad the quake struck AFTER my surgery, so
that my doctor's "Star Wars" gun didn't waver).
But I DID have a problem: the elevators all automatically shut
down, so I couldn't get from the 7th floor (where the
operation had taken place) down to the 5th floor recovery
area, where my poor husband was waiting, scared to death. I
asked the nurses to please dial his cell phone, and they
obliged but the cells weren't working either! Meanwhile, the
orderly tried to wheel me into one elevator after another, but
he couldn't get any of the doors to open. I even suggested
walking down the stairs or maybe sliding down them on my
rear end. I thought maybe we should try to find a burly fellow
who could throw me over his shoulder in a Fireman's Carry
and take me down two floors.
Of course, it was finally all over—the elevator doors
eventually opened, and I was wheeled down to the recovery
room, where I was reunited with my now very frazzled
husband. When I saw my surgeon again, he told me that they
hadn't been able to get all the stones this time, so I would
have to do it all again, and meanwhile, TO DRINK LOTS OF
WATER.
And that's my "Prelude to a Kiss" message for YOU.
Related Entries:
08-Jul-2008: Requiem for a Clown
01-Jul-2008: It Was a Festival, All Right
18-May-2008: Ordinary People
26-Apr-2008: What's It Like? (To Act in a movie)
24-Mar-2008: An Easter Diary from Anne
09-Mar-2008: The Lucky Lady--UPDATE!
27-Jan-2008: Faces & Mazes
19-Dec-2007: Anne's Diary: Spies
02-Dec-2007: Stories of Good & Evil
11-Sep-2007: For Kari, Once Again
