Gag Reflex

Before I get started on this, I need to apologize to Libby. Saturday, she was changing Norah's poopy pants (on weekends, I usually play the "I don't want you to miss out on this rite of parenthood since you miss out on changing poopy diapers five days a week" card--but, Saturday, I played the "I shouldn't have to change poopy diapers on my birthday" card instead because variety is the spice of life) and she almost threw up right on top of the poor girl. I scoffed at her poor gag reflex. And for that, I apologize because the same thing just happened to me (though, admittedly, the diaper Libby changed wasn't that bad--being a courteous gentleman, I offered to take the offensive thing to the trash while Libby recovered and took the opportunity to steal a whiff. On a scale of 1-10, it was a 6, at best, and Norah usually hovers between 5 and 8).

On to the story.

Something just happened to me that never has before. Norah had a poop so profound that it made me gag. Here's a little perspective, just to accurately gauge just how monumental this dump was.

I wouldn't say that I have the strongest stomach, but it's not exactly weak, either. I grew up shoveling cow shit from barns--and some of that stuff was beyond wretched, not mention the sheer quantities if we'd been a little lax for a few weeks (oh, and the consistency--sometimes a grain shovel was needed, meaning, a shovel with sides was necessary to keep the seeping sewage from sliding off the sides--that sounded almost pretty, despite its horrific mental image). Oh, and don't forget calving season, when globs of afterbirth and other nefarious body excretions would be added into the mix, possibly several days after the birthing fact. I have seen dead cows that have been rotting in the hot sun for days, sometimes weeks. I've seen quite a lot of animal death, actually. Farms have a way of accumulating dead animals. It's a sad truth.

And never, not once, have I lost complete control of my gag reflex and puked all over the place.

Yet I can't say I have an iron stomach because I have gagged before. Just once, that I can recall, but it was a memorable once. I won't go TOO much into the grizzly details, but let's just say that I came upon a dead cow. I didn't KNOW there was a dead cow there--it was one that Dad had hauled off into the back part of one of our pastures to let the coyotes take care of. Apparently, the coyotes had not yet gotten there. Or, perhaps, they were too disgusted by the carnage of the sight. For the cow had exploded. Much like the fabled whale on the coastline that showered bits of decaying blubber on bystanders for hundreds of yards, the gases in this cow had accumulated until it had exploded. And I all but literally stumbled upon it in the pasture. I did, literally, slip in part of it, though. It was a gruesome scene. Black, fetid globs of blood and flesh. Maggots, oh the maggots. It left an impression.

OK, I guess I did end up getting pretty into the grizzly details, huh? Sorry about that.

But it wasn't this macabre spectacle that set my stomach to rumbling in a most distressing way. It was the smell. The smell of death is not one that I've really been able to get used to despite getting a fair bit of practice with it in my youth. But I've never felt more than a bit nauseated by the stench, except for this one time. See, it wasn't that the smell was any worse than normal. A dead mouse, if properly aged, can smell just as bad as a dead horse--dead animal is dead animal. No, it was the sheer quantity of the smell that engulfed my senses and drove me to the very edge of lost lunchitude. It seems strange to quantify smell as though it has a measurable mass, but there you have it--and, in fact, I would swear it DID have mass. That was the part that made me gag. I, like many people probably, tend to try and reactively plug my nose when I smell something terrible . . . .

You know how they say that smell plays a vital role in taste (because we can only taste five different qualities, it's the smell that adds that subtle nuance to flavor)? Probably you can see where this is going. I took in a full mouthful of fetid, rotten, putrid, decomposing, exploded cow air. I swear, it was like a fog. And I nearly ralphed.

But I didn't. And, since that day, I've been a touch more sensitive to the smell of dead things, but I've still somehow managed to never really feel like I was going to puke when accosted by terrible smells.

Until tonight.

Let me preface this a little bit by reiterating that Norah is a stealth pooper. Gabe was great. Whenever he was taking a dump, we knew it. He bore down like he was passing a Shetland pony, and he always looked very relieved and proud of himself when he was done. Not Norah. She will appear, for all intents and purposes, to be going about her business, and suddenly we'll catch a whiff of something that wasn't there before. She might be standing, sitting, lying down, sleeping, eating, crying, laughing, walking, crawling, or playing. It doesn't matter. She won't even pause when it happens. If we're lucky, she'll fart and we can lean in close afterward to find out if it was sound AND fury, but that doesn't happen very often.

Usually, she stinks to high heaven, so it's pretty easy to catch. Unfortunately, I've had a pretty terrible head cold for the past five days, so I can't really smell anything. Add to that the fact that she'd already had FOUR poops today (the poor thing really hasn't made the transition from formula to milk all that gracefully, I'm afraid, and it's barely showed signs of improvement almost two months later), and you can imagine that I wasn't really paying very close attention to the situation.

How long the poop had been in there, I'm not sure. It couldn't have been more than an hour because that's how long it had been since I'd last changed her diaper.

Actually, I'm going to go all CSI on everyone here and try to deduce when, exactly, it happened. Based on the pattern of the poop, I would estimate that she did it while she was lying down. It didn't have a normal placement in her diaper--down where gravity would have carried it, mostly between her legs, if she'd been sitting or standing. Instead, it was riding high in the back. VERY high. About ten minutes before the fiasco began, she had been lying on the floor having a juice bottle. So, if I had to guess, that's when I would place the time of diaper death.

When it happened isn't important, but the fact that it was riding high is VERY important. After she got up, she went about her business--flipping through some books, carrying around a piece of string that's she's been strangely obsessed with for the past few days while leaning against one piece of furniture or another, and finally crawling into the dining room where I was helping Gabe put away his Play Doh and other assorted messes from the afternoon. All the while, I suspected nothing.

Then, after I finished in the dining room, I went into the living room to clean up the toys in there and I saw something on the front of my leather rocking chair. I thought it was cat puke. It had the same consistency, looking as if it was composed of 3/4 just chewed catfood and 1/4 hairball (our cat Typhoon is a narcissist and keeps her weight under control by being bulimic, puking up her food right after eating it about once every three days or so). But I hadn't heard her puking, and she very rarely does it on the furniture these days, so I went over to investigate.

I stuck my nose in close to get a smell.

"Oooooooh god," I moaned to myself. Definitely poop. I closed my eyes and silently counted to ten, carefully replacing each number with a choice curse word. There were four separate smears of the stuff on the chair. I turned to find Norah but didn't have to look very hard. She was crawling into the living room, as if inspecting to see how I had reacted to the news. She smiled at me. I picked her up and stood her in front of the television so I could get a good look at her diaper, expecting to find a bit of a spillover from the top.

There was no spillover, there was a full-fledged blowout. It ran halfway up her back and was starting to soak through her shirt and pants. I pulled the shirt back and that was when I nearly puked down my daughter's back. I think it was the sound, like peeling a wet towel off a linoleum floor. It was EVERYWHERE.

Thankfully, I quickly recovered myself and immediately began poop triage on all of the effected areas. I managed to get her out of her shirt without spreading it through her hair and finished undressing her while she was completely distracted by the TV. Then I carefully wiped off every inch of her back, butt, and legs--almost all of which were at least partially exposed to the sludge and some of which was thoroughly coated with a sticky grime that was as difficult to remove as peanut butter. I laid her on the floor and got her into a clean diaper and some clean clothes.

And that's when I realized, to my horror, that our carpet in the living room is the same color, EXACTLY, as the poop was. So, after cleaning up my chair, I took to sniffing along my carpet like a goddamn bloodhound, trying to find any toxic spills, but I found none thanks to this cold. Thankfully, Libby is a little bit ahead of me on recovering from this cold--and she had to work late tonight and should be home soon--so I'll be able to gauge whether or not I missed any spots by the reaction she has when she walks into the living room. Fingers crossed!