Have You Never Been Marrow...

Okay, I had the bone marrow biopsy this morning and, as much as I'd like to craft a rant about how horrifically painful it was, it really wasn't that bad. Don't get me wrong, it sucked donkey danglers, but it sure as fuck wasn't the Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Torture that everyone online made it out to be. Fucking online alarmist dickheads.

Basically, after sitting on my ass for a fuckload of time in the waiting room, they took me into another room, had me drop my drawers and lie on my stomach on this table. The doc and the nurse were both very cool, and we were all just a buncha Chatty Cathy's throughout the whole procedure.

The doc started by swabbing down the poop-deck -- actually just above and to the left of the poop-deck. Right around the area where, had I any actual body fat, there'd be one of them back-dimples. Then he jammed a needle filled with local anesthetic into said area and told me there'd be a slight burning sensation. There was. Then he jammed the needle kinda into the bone and said he was trying to numb up the bone sheath or some shit. Luckily, it didn't hurt, or I would've numbed up HIS bone sheath.

Throughout all this, we were just chat-tattering away. He asked where I was from, I said "Chicago," he said he grew up on "the mean streets of Chicago," I said I grew up on "the mean streets of Deerfield." He laughed. I winced. We talked about Iowa (I was wearing my Grinnell College t-shirt), and he said he's thought about doing the Ragbrai bike race. I said "sounds grea--OW!" All in all, it really would've been quite enjoyable, all this chatting, had he not been jamming fucking needles into my bones.

So, yeah, he rammed a needle into the back of my pelvis and said that there would be "some pressure." There was. It was kinda like the pressure you'd feel if... oh, I don't know, if someone were ramming a needle into the back of your pelvis. Then he said I might feel a little pain as he started to draw out the bone marrow.

That kinda sucked. And yes, Jasper Mockinbard, you're right when you said that the sensation was akin to that of the dementors from Harry Potter sucking out one's life force. It was a combination of that and being turned inside out... ass first.

Then came the fun part -- he had to get a biopsy of the bone itself. I don't know exactly how he was accomplishing this, as I was on my stomach facing away from him, but I'm pretty sure he drove a backhoe up my... backhoe, and started chipping away at the bone until a coupla good-sized hunks cracked off. It's probably similar to the feeling someone numb from the waist down would have as they were being mauled by a bear. Or a bear surgeon. Unsettling, yes. Painful, eh.

And that was pretty much it. I had to lie there for 15 minutes to make sure I didn't start spraying blood out my fresh backhole, and then the Old Lady drove me home.

And now here I lie, clotting. I have a headache and my back feels like a bear surgeon mauled it, but all in all, it's not that shitty. I'm not supposed to lift anything or go up any stairs for 10 hours, and I can't swim or bathe for a coupla days, or apparently my cork'll pop out.

There was a strange, Truman Show-esque moment as I was getting ready to leave. The doc said, "That wasn't so bad, was it?" and I agreed. So he says, "Well then, make sure to mention that in your blog."

What. The. Shit?!?!