The Penetration of Men

A story I never wanted to tell

Yes. That’s real blood.

When I came to, I was standing naked in the shower, but the shower was off. There was blood and feces on the floor, but that wasn’t the weirdest part.

I was screaming uncontrollably as I slapped my hand against the tiled wall, like I was trying to wake myself from a nightmare. I just may have been.

What I would later figure out was that the body had forced a vulnerability the mind couldn’t bear.

Four days earlier, on a Saturday, I’d had an aggressive hemorrhoidectomy. That’s the procedure they perform when one’s lifetime of hemorrhoids has become so problematic that removing them is the best option.

That word, best, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. It’s debatable whether it’s true or not.

What is true is that I am very unsure about publishing this story. Part of me believes it is too graphic, and another worries about how vulnerable it makes me. I am, after all, a man. Vulnerable isn’t our preferred flavor of tea.

Perhaps that is exactly what’s worth drilling down into: Can men stay men and be vulnerable at the same time?

As I write this draft, I’m rounding out week four of recovery. It’s been exactly three weeks since the shower blackout incident, and all is not good.

Fun fact: It was week seven before I finally finished this essay. On top of wondering if I really wanted to share this story, especially considering how non-Christmassy this tale is, the task of writing has been too heavy a lift for most of my recovery.

Let’s back up a little.

My hemhorroidectomy was quite aggressive, so the recovery has been lengthy and maddening. This was my second such surgery. The first one was far less aggressive, which means the recovery was easier. The downside is that the less aggressive approach would have taken several surgeries to completely remove the problem.

That first surgery, I kept secret. Only my wife knew about it because I felt ashamed.

This one, I’m telling anyone who expresses interest, and for a couple of reasons.

1. It’s helping me feel less ashamed about something silly to feel shame over.

2. It might be useful to someone else. (Looking at you, brothers.)

By useful, I don’t mean that anyone will read this and then change their bathroom habits. Doubtful. I’ve known for years that my bathroom habits were problematic, especially after my first surgery, but I didn’t change.

What I will tell you is that smartphones are a real problem in this regard. That’s all I’ll say because you most likely know exactly what I mean.

What I mean by useful is that we might feel a little more comfortable talking about something so vulnerable. Other than our emotional traumas, there may be no part of our bodies more vulnerable than our holes, and the rectum is the most universally vulnerable of the bunch.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we each have one. None of us wants anything traumatic to happen there. Like, I dunno, the application of a scalpel to remove parts of the body.

Speaking of seeing one’s parts, I’ve come to believe that one hasn’t fully lived until one has witnessed a smiling surgeon holding up a small jar filled with melon-ball-shaped chunks of one's own meat.

What follows the surgery is 3-5 days of no bowel movements, then a very painful first bowel movement. You know, like the one that caused me to blackout.

It’s two weeks of extreme pain, then 2-3 more weeks of maddening inflammation and confusion in the bathroom. Then there’s the crappy sleep, the drop in muscle mass, decreased conditioning, and a persistent psychological warfare with reality.

My doctor prepared me for exactly none of this when he promised, “This is the last time you will have this surgery.” All I heard was “last time you will have this surgery.”

I’m in… was my general demeanor.

The day of the shower scene was a Wednesday. I’d been movement-free for about three whole days. By movement-free, I mean all movement, and by “free,” I mean free from, not free to.

I mostly stayed on the couch, lying down. I only got up for the bathroom or bedtime.

It was 5:00 pm on Wednesday. Cristina, my wife, stood up to take the dogs for their evening walk. I stood up, declaring, “Well, I’m going up to the bathroom so I can not poop again.”

It sure seemed funny at the time.

As I closed the bathroom door, I heard her walking out the sliding door with the dogs downstairs.

My bathroom instructions were clear. Sit for no more than five minutes unless something happens. If something passes, then give it another 2-3 minutes to see if something else happens. By that point, I’d gotten into the habit of standing up at about the five-minute mark, dissatisfied.

A hot shower is the solution to all pain, so after five minutes of sitting, I stood up to get in the shower. Within seconds, I was hit with a powerful wave of paristalsis. That’s when the colon starts to do its job of moving former food out the back door.

Normally, it’s a relieving sensation. Not that evening. Not in the shower.

“Oh my god,” I said to nobody, realizing that I was going to pass something.

This is not the place to do that. Can’t do that. Also, it’s gonna hurt.

And hurt it did.

The pain was so great, I immediately felt like I was going to vomit or pass out, so I turned off the water and lowered myself to my knees. Then I leaned forward in a kind of child’s pose, diagonal across the square shower floor.

From there, I felt more stools pass. The colon was running the show, not the brain. I was simply a witness to this until I wasn’t.

That’s when I blacked out.

What’s been enlightening as I’ve opened up about this is how many men have reported some kind of personal hemorrhoid story. Nearly every man that I’ve talked to copped to his own experience.

Apparently, hemorrhoids happen to a lot of us. We just don’t talk about it. No man, gay or straight, wants to talk about hemorrhoids. I might be wrong, but none of my gay friends—bottoms and tops—have ever copped to hemorrhoids.

Taking it a step further, I doubt any man wants to talk (or even think) about someone performing surgery on their butthole. No thanks.

But straight men don’t want to discuss the topic of buttholes at all. Not unless it’s in irony. We certainly don’t want to talk about anything penetrating us, not physically, and definitely not emotionally.

Credit where credit is due, this idea came to me from someone I wrote about in my last essay [The Deepest Truth About a Man’s Worth], Richard Meacock. He was my high school English teacher, but also someone who took a paternal role during my early twenties.

“Straight men are petrified of being penetrated,” Richard opined one day in his very British way, adding, “physically and emotionally.”

At the time, I giggled, but I was a little offended. I was clearly an example of the exception that proves the rule. At the time, even if physical penetration was a non-starter for me—no hate, it’s just not for me—I didn’t feel afraid of emotional penetration.

If that last part was ever true, it stopped being true at some point as I aged. At fifty-one, emotional penetration feels scarier than it did when Richard said that, and I haven’t shifted on physical penetration.

No, thank you.

I also don’t like melon in my fruit salad, most country music, and blacking out, which is funny for a guy who used to get blackout drunk. I really dislike an actual blackout, something that has happened half a dozen times in my life.

When I came to in the shower, standing up as you may recall, I was confused and terrified. I also didn’t realize I was in the shower. Part of the brain noticed that I was screaming, even as another part was doing the screaming.

It was like I was observing the Damon project from two different parts of experience at the same time.

Once I woke up enough to stop swaying, I rinsed off, cleaned up the shower, and patted myself dry with a towel. As I did so, I caught my reflection in the mirror. Blood streamed down my face. I’d assumed the blood in the shower was from the surgery site.

Apparently, in my blackout stupor, I’d banged my head against one or both of the hangers mounted to the shower wall, one for my razor, and the other for a squigee.

After mopping up the blood, I finally opened the bathroom door and walked out into the cool, dry air of the upstairs corridor. That’s when I heard Cristina returning from the dog walk.

“Honey?” I whisper-yelled so as not to raise her hackles.

“Yes?” She replied from her upper octave.

“Can you come help me with something?”

“Sure!” she sang back.

The sound of her feet striding up the tiled stairs let me know she was coming.

Before she could fully ascend, I added, “Okay, but please don’t freak out.”

Cristina first glanced at my torso, looking for something worthy of a freak out. Then she saw my head and the blood.

“We agreed you wouldn’t freak out!” I asserted, which wasn’t exactly true.

Asking for help has never been a strength for me. I’m more guilty of claiming, “If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself.” Part of me also hates that I make this claim. It’s so uncharitable, and the only people who say it are always miserable fucks.

Again, this is more of a problem for men. We could be stranded in the middle of nowhere, holding our guts in with a hubcap, failing to call for help. A la, I don’t want to worry anyone.

Asking for help is just another penetration, this one to our story of self. It illuminates that we’re not capable of handling everything that happens.

We expect that we could shove our guts back in, then stitch our abdominal wall back together, Rambo style, long enough to [maybe] pop by the ER on our way home. That’s after we roll the crashed car back onto its wheels and turn over the engine.

It’s this mentality that keeps us from talking about uncomfortable topics like hemorrhoids. It also isolates us. We each think we’re the only one, out here alone.

We do it with all our vulnerable parts, physical and emotional.

These last four seven weeks, I’ve often wondered why nobody ever taught me how to go to the bathroom. No disrespect to my mother. She taught me how to use the tools of the bathroom. That’s as much as any of us gets, because nobody taught our parents anything more, possibly less.

This is what I’ve learned recently:

1. Sitting on the toilet for more than five minutes without anything passing? Bad. Get off the toilet. Come back later.

2. After something passes, give it 2-3 minutes more. That’s it.

3. People will have gas. Sitting on the toilet isn’t the best or only solution.

This goes against our current culture of endlessly swiping before wiping, where we sit and mindlessly push from our abdominals on one of the most sensitive and important (also valuable) parts of the body.

May my device never be within arm’s reach while I’m on the toilet again, and may I be occupied and out of the bathroom quickly enough to not care.

Never again is what my doctor promised, and I intend to make good on that. This has been too high a price to pay for extended private time. If I need more alone time, I’ll get it standing in the bathroom afterward.

Or I’ll go for a walk, for crying out loud.

Later that fateful Wednesday night, a friend stopped over, one who happens to be a doctor. He checked out my cuts, my sore neck, and my general condition. Best guess, I suffered a vagus nerve event, brought on by the stress of the spontaneous and explosive bowel movement.

May you never experience such a thing, dear reader, whatever your gender.

What I fear this says for men is that we have to be forced into vulnerability. We’ll hold the line on “I’m fine” until we’re finally on the ground, literally or figuratively. And even then, we’ll be checking the mirror to see if we can hide all the evidence.

In my case, it was all over my face. My immediate intuition was to hide it from my wife. That’s assuming I could have, which I couldn’t. From this side of it, that seems ridiculous, but I was in the absolute throes of vulnerability in that moment. That, and my adrenaline was still pumping like a bee stinger.

My casual assessment is that most men would have considered the same: Hide it and act like nothing happened.

It’s hard to concede that Richard was right, at least in my case. I didn’t use to be this way, but I don’t know how to be otherwise.

The best I can do, as far as I can tell, is to keep sharing my feelings and stories. Speaking of stories, the main story I want to tell myself is that I am a man who is okay with feeling uncomfortable. If I keep it up, I may even one day be okay with feeling vulnerable.

A big part of me doesn’t think that’s possible. That’s the part of me that thinks, this is just what being a man is for many of us. There are exceptions, and I once thought I was one of them, but I’m not. This is my male humanity expressed.

So tell me, Men, what am I missing in this essay?

~Damon