Bottom

It’s been a painful couple of months physically, culminating in a day that saw me working from home last Monday. I started off working from bed at 9am and by 10am I was feeling like I was being pierced with pins in my bottom that took my breath away with their prickles. I was unable to focus enough to work at all, even after taking pain relief and using the cream that I have for such occasions. I called in sick and by 11am I was groaning out loud and had delegated the task of finding me a doctor’s appointment to Steve. I lay face down, and succumbed to the throbbing. Lotus came and sat on my upper leg for an hour or so, before moving aside to the IKEA armchair for most of the day.

Steve did manage to get me an appointment with a doctor who is new to town so had some availability, and Steve drove me there as well. I wanted a prescription for banding the hemorrhoids and I wasn’t going to leave without it.

The doctor, about my age and wearing a floaty shirt, cotton blue trousers and Adidas Sambas in a slightly lighter blue colour to what Lara received for Christmas, was sympathetic and capable. ‘Yes, having children does it,’ she agreed. She gave me the referral as well as a recommendation for some stool softening tablets to ingest regularly after the operation. ‘No side effects. You just take it like toothpaste.’ She also suggested I buy some ear wax drops to dissolve the eat wax that had blocked my ears since returning from Cairns on the very lovely work retreat I enjoyed three weeks ago.

In fact I am on a waiting list for this banding and have been for more than a year, but I am no longer prepared to keep waiting, and am not confident of the length of that waiting list, or its transparency. After a few phonecalls and intake questionnaires in which I highlighted the crippling pain, I found a surgeon who had reasonable availability and I am booked in for the procedure in a month.

My bottom is usually still painful for the whole day after use, helped a little with Nurofen and Panadol. I can work and function despite the pain. I apply the cream too in case it does anything and chuckle to myself when I remember the time last year when I went up to my room, slightly sweaty with the pain, wanting to apply the cream, but Rhea was in my bed.

‘Can you please leave my room?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she replied, in a teenage mood.

‘OK,’ I said. Then I proceeding to put some of the cream on my finger, lie down beside her and apply it.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m putting this cream in my bottom.’

She left the room straight away.