Collajiji: an absurd tale of romance, physician burnout and also collages
A while back at a dinner party, a friend’s date asked me, “you’re an emergency doctor, right? What’s the craziest thing you ever had to take out of someone’s ass?”
His excitement was palpable. I laughed. I was kind of delighted to answer. I immediately thought of the Costco-sized bottle of Advil a patient rammed up his ass that a colleague had mentioned just the other week. Apparently it rattled like maracas whenever the patient moved. I recalled the countless x-rays I had seen with the silhouettes of various vegetables, sporting goods, and sex toys that patients had mysteriously “accidentally” fallen on over the years. But, I realized, none of those patients were mine. Nearly a decade of practice and I had never had my own rectal foreign body patient. The smile faded from my face. I muttered something about the Advil bottle but it was unconvincing and clearly not my story. The friend’s date slowly snuck away from the conversation, unimpressed.
Since that day, I’ve realized that my work life is a monotony of endlessly falling little old ladies. And not the kind that fall on rectal foreign bodies. I got into this field partially for the thrill of bearing witness to the absurd self-inflicted maladies only human beings can be the authors of. And here I was, a simple facilitator in the nursing home conveyor belt. Where were the maggot-infested wounds, the screwdrivers jammed into people’s skulls and the patients with spiderman delusions climbing through the air ducts of the hospital? Those were only stories I had heard, but they were not my stories.
Gradually, I lost my spark. My husband noticed. He tried to cheer me up, suggested hobbies, but I just couldn’t seem to shake it.
One day at work, I shuffled lifelessly over to pick up the next chart as usual. Reading it, my senses were roused by a small jolt of long-dormant curiosity. What’s this? Chief complaint: multiple rectal foreign bodies. Could it be? I walked in the room with anticipation. And there he was, a man who looked suspiciously like my husband, only with a bad wig and fake moustache.
“Jean-Michel?” I asked. He looked up at me and winked while holding his finger to his mouth in the international shhh it’s a secret sign.
“No, the name is Seymour… Seymour Butz,” he said looking at me intently and waiting for recognition.
“Alright then Mr…. Butz, what seems to be the problem today?” I asked, not quite understanding what was happening.
“You see, I was minding my own business getting out of the shower when I accidentally slipped and fell. There was lots of stuff on the ground and I was naked of course, so when I fell, some stuff naturally went in my rear passage,” he said, gesturing behind him.
“Things?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know, just random objects lying on the ground… bric-a-brac and whatnot. And I fell a few times so… things just kept accidentally getting in there.”
“Ok Mr. Butz. Let’s get an x-ray and we’ll see what we find.” I gave him a somewhat confused smile. Just what exactly was he doing?
10 minutes later, I stood in front of the x-ray images with my mouth hanging open in awe. A semi-circle of my colleagues had formed around the computer screen. We had never seen anything like it before. There, overlying the grey shadows of the rectum, was an incredible collage of unlikely and sometimes unrecognizable objects.
“Is that a turkey baster?” I heard someone ask.
“I think I see a tiny horse,” said another.
“There’s at least $3.75 in there,” somebody counted.
“Sainte-Bénite-de-l’Assomption,” I heard someone whisper under their breath.
“I don’t know how he fit all that stuff in there. It’s like a fucking magician’s hat,” another voice mused behind me.
And then I understood: my husband, the man of my life, had just sacrificed his rectum to transform me into a medical celebrity. This would be a career’s worth of storytelling. Christ, I could take this to my own nursing home one day and charm the nurses with it; gain some empathy so they would change my diaper more often and sneak me extra pudding. I felt at that moment as if I were in the scene where Dorothy lands in Oz and everything goes from dusty sepia tones to vivid colour for the first time. I felt… a spark.
I wiped away a tear of appreciation and put my game face on.
“I’m gonna need a nurse!” I theatrically yelled as I snapped my gloves into place then turned to look the assigned nurse in the eyes, “you ready?” I asked her intensely.
Then we entered the room, the buzzing of the department fading behind us as the door closed.
We were in there for at least an hour and 40 minutes. I took the time to admire each object as I extracted it methodically from my husband’s rectum. Some objects were familiar: the tiny spatula we never had a use for, one of my son’s Pokemons, a pumpkin spice candle I had planned on regifting. Some were beautiful: a marble chess piece, an antique skeleton key, a perfectly symmetrical sea shell. And yes, there was indeed a tiny toy horse. Each object more surprising and perfect than the last. As I leaned in to do a final sweep, I whispered in my husband’s ear, “thank you.”
“Happy anniversary,” he replied in a fading voice.
“But… it’s not our anniversary,” I said.
“Check again,” he insisted.
I pulled my gloves as high as they would go and went back in a final time. Just as I was about to give up, my finger caught on a tiny metal object. I pulled it out and could see that it was a ring. An engagement ring to be exact. And tied to it, a note made nearly illegible due to the fecal matter. I turned my back to hide it from the nurse, but I could just make it out:
Will you marry me again? It read.
My eyes welled with emotion as I nodded my head vigorously in affirmation.
“See… I told you it was our anniversary,” he managed to whisper, just before he passed out.
And there you have the (fictional) tale of my second marriage and of how my husband saved me from physician burnout. When I first shared it, a friend thought it was actually true and that this represented a beautiful, grand gesture by my adoring husband. It must have been a particularly disturbing reading experience. While this tale is an ode to him and his general supportiveness, I prefer celebrating our anniversary in a way that does not necessitate urgent surgical and psychiatric consults. Seriously, that’s just too many things up a rectum to be healthy, even in the name of love. And to my darling husband, if you’re reading this, please don’t worry about any unrealistic expectations of your rectal vault and its role in commemorating our next anniversary. I’m still ok with just watching a movie on Netflix and exchanging belated greeting cards as usual.
But also, this tale is a loose segue into the collection of collages I made of various kijiji items that look like they belong together. Only they are meant to be shoved in the room of a house rather than a rectum. I hope you enjoy them nonetheless. I assembled them while sitting and waiting for my children to fall asleep because that seemed like a normal thing to do with my time. I call them Collajijis even though they are all from facebook marketplace, simply because it sounds more adorable. Each listing is already sold or I can’t be bothered to find the link but I can possibly find it if you are interested and it is still 2020. Otherwise you can just forget it, sister. Go waste your own time while your children fall asleep.
The Collajijis:
