5 Things That Will Turn Your Bodily Fluids Straight-Up Alien
It's a statistical fact that going to see a doctor is worse than a biting a sandwich and finding a really long hair enrobed in warm mayonnaise dangling from your lips afterward. No one likes the doctor. You go to the doctor when your life depends on it. It is due to our instinct for self-preservation that we endure these givers of bad news and prodders of genitals. Our discomfort is in no small part related to the fact that weird, embarrassing shit is often afoot when you need a doctor. Something has gone super wonky, and you need a professional to work it out for you. Because sometimes you just go jamming your food hole full of shit that runs a fun house chain in your body and makes everything work like a Nickelodeon cartoon that makes no sense but is, more or less, not a super big deal.
How To Shit A Rainbow
I write about poop more than a respectable adult should, but if I don't do it, who will? In that spirit, let me tell you about what's wrong with your butthole. For most of us, our 34 daily poops go off without a hitch. We sit down, spend a half-hour playing on the phone, open a window, and windsprint away from the room when no one is looking so we can't take the blame for the acrid wasteland of despair we've left behind. But what happens when all doesn't go as planned?
Like the poor children of the '70s who endured Frankenberry's pink poo scare, modern deuce aficionados have to be wary of what they ingest, because your insides are working in the dark and have no way to sort out the ungodly mess you throw at them in a way that won't be harrowing if you eat the wrong thing. For instance, Burger King's infamous Darth Whopper or whatever the fuck they called that needlessly black hamburger they made a while back. That thing straight up made you shit green.
Most of us have come to accept that dropping the kids off at the pool is going to be predictable, within reason. Maybe you're having a robust day and lay out a caber that a Scotsman would be proud of, maybe you're having a mousy day and peppering the bowl with niblets. That's your deal, and I'll not discuss it further. But texture and girth aside, we tend to expect it to not look like Slimer just shot out the back door and had pool party in the shitter.
The Black Whopper didn't just give you spinachy poops; it turned your ass-smudgings full-on Green Goddess green. The buns were supposed to be tinted with A1 steak sauce, and must have used some kind of amazingly concentrated form of the seasoning to provide the bad luck of the Irish that followed.
Pepto Bismol is another crap shoot for your crap, as the stomach medication has a habit of turning your ass into a portal to a dark underworld of seething black hatred. The bismuth in Pepto can combine with sulfur in your GI tract and turn as black as the souls of the damned. Just imagine the confidence you'll have in your diarrhea medicine if you take a few doses and then release a torrent of angry midnight into the toilet. That's your insides telling you it's time to try Imodium.
Slightly more terrifying that a Pepto obsidian squirt is the phantom white shit you'll get if you have to endure a barium sulfate shake at the hospital. Barium sulfate is typically used when you have to have an x-ray or CT scan and the doctors want to see what's going on in your guts. The barium goes in, coats your insides, and helps scans pick up any areas of concern. They'll mix it into a shake or somesuch that you need to ingest an hour or two before the actual scan, and then you're good to go. Unfortunately for some, as the barium is excreted out the back door, it has a tendency to go all White Walker in your intestines and suck the soul out of your otherwise-healthy poop, leaving it a pale, terrifying husk of a white monstrosity that you'll probably stare at with an arched eyebrow for a moment or two before really hitting that flush handle hard.
Specific Teas Can Make Your Urine Smell Delicious
Being the mature individual that you are, you'll probably have no interest in my bathroom musings. You might want to just brew up a hot cup of herbal tea and sit down and read the serious work of a serious journalist who would never point out that your just made your piss hole into a goddamn waffle house. In your face, serious journalism fan!
You may have encountered maple syrup urine disease in your travels -- a condition characterized by the intense need to piss all over an IHOP. Wait, no, that was something else. But the disease does make your pee smell like delicious (but not delicious) maple syrup. So it's probably a little disconcerting if you happen to smell that when you're letting loose in between binged episodes of Ozark.
Turns out the genetic disease isn't the only cause of the smell, however, as Fenugreek tea also seems to have a similar effect on your plumbing. Fucking a maple tree will possibly do it too, but I haven't heard back from the intern I sent out on that test run. In any event, if you start smelling like you've been using flapjacks as a dick bib, just try to recall your tea-drinking habits before you get too bent out of shape over it. There are other things to worry about when it comes to the dangle of your wangle, anyway.
While stanky pee is obviously a point of concern, you're probably also going to be taken aback should the day arrive when your splendid golden nectar starts sputtering out like a bloody rainbow sprinkler attachment. I distinctly remember a day in my first apartment when I had realized groceries were a thing you needed to actively go out and buy if you wanted a variety of food in your house, and thus I was forced to raid my cupboards in desperation for whatever I had handy. My aunt, who was almost raised by humans, had brought over a number of arguably edible substances as a housewarming gift, and that was the story behind the ten cans of beets in my pantry.
So I ate beets. I ate four cans of beets. And later that day, my piss came out so red that I briefly considered the possibility I had contracted Ebola at some point earlier in the week. It was like the Kool-Aid man was pranking me by standing behind me and pissing just between my legs. I'd never seen anything like it. And slightly worse was that I really had to piss, so I had to stand there and finish for what seemed like an impossibly long time as this crimson deluge raged forth, hoping to god I didn't pass out from blood loss and end up unconscious in the bathroom covered in blood piss.
Certain Foods Can Make You Sweat Cat Piss
Ever take the city bus? It's like travelling to Narnia if the trip takes too long, and Narnia fucking hates you. I used to bus to work all the time back in the day, and the trip was literally 90 minutes to get where I was going, so I had a lot of time to really stew in the experience. One thing I noticed with disturbing regularity was the number of people who smelled like their cat had tried to bury them in the yard that morning.
My mom had a thing for cats, so I always had a few in the house growing up, including one who assumed a good substitute for a litter box was wherever he happened to be when the piss came out. So the smell of cat piss is seared into my brain. I'd know it at 50 yards. And there were a handful of bus people who clearly left their clothes within reach of their cats. Or so I thought!
Turns out if you're a big fan of protein but maybe not so much a fan of carbs, you're setting your body up to burn protein for energy and excrete ammonia as a waste product. That ammonia comes out through your sweat glands mixed with all the various other glandular juices that make you into the musky delight we all want to be trapped next to on a hot day on public transportation. So when you run for the bus and work up a sweat, what comes out is basically your own personal brand of cat piss.
I'll never know for sure if those bus people were all just ham fanatics who hated rice and bread or if they legit had 50 cats at home. I mean, some of them clearly had the 50 cats at home, but I can't paint everyone with the same brush. I guess what I'm saying is that you can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge a cat owner by the eye-stinging aroma of piss that hangs about them in a cloud.
Fun side note: That cat I had when I was a kid? Totally pissed on a pair of my jeans in sixth grade, and I'd clearly gone nose-blind to the whole deal, so I went to school one day stinking like a goddamn alley cat's tangled backside. Really helped me figure out who my real friends were.
Vegetables Can Turn Your Skin Full-On Oompa Loompa
If you were a kid from the '60s through the '80s, "skin tone" was a racist crayon. Nowadays, those of us who just use Tiki torches in the yard for campfires know that there's a little more to skin color than all that, and humans have a number of hues and tones. None of them, with maybe one notable exception, are orange. There just aren't orange people. Not normally, anyway.
As it happens, the saying "You are what you eat" kind of applies here, thanks to a condition called carotenemia. A number of super healthy veggies -- like carrots, for instance -- are packed to the gills with beta-carotene, a thing they say on commercials when they talk about healthy stuff, and that means it's good for you. But like Alien movies and alcoholic milkshakes, too much and you're treading in dangerous territory.
That excess of beta-carotene in your body can and will start turning you colors, from a pale yellow all the way to a distinct orange if you're not careful. Like colloidal silver turning your ass blue, carotenemia will turn you a delightful shade of tangerine dream. Even if you alter your diet to eat like a normal human and less like a rabbit, you're potentially looking at a few months of life on the golden side of things.
All Up in Your Blood
You like your blood, right? You keep it pretty close by, try not to leave it laying around in restaurants or flea markets, and you definitely don't flash it around in Vampire Town. It's got to be super off-putting to discover that you're living your life as a red-blooded Canadian (or whatever you are -- Alsatian, Martian, etc.), only to discover that shit isn't red at all.
A 42-year-old man was supposed to be getting surgery when doctors took a moment to appreciate that his blood was a dark, verdant green. That's not a usual thing, you know. Like those no-account Vulcans and their lack of iron in their hemoglobin, this fellow also had some serious hemoglobin issues. Specifically, he was suffering from the not-at-all-difficult-to-say sulfhaemoglobinaemia, a condition wherein sulfur molecules get all up on your hemoglobin like some pervy bro at a club.
So how does one get sulfhaemoglobinaemia? You can't even get that shit on Amazon. In this man's case, it was Sumatriptan. Sumatriptan is a migraine drug, marketed as Imitrex and a few other names, and this guy was taking a shitload of it. How much of it? Somewhere between the recommended dose and a "turn you blood green" dose. So if you have an issue with migraines, do yourself a favor and follow the directions. Because even if green blood sounds cool, that shit will probably kill you eventually. And that's not logical. See what I did there? Vulcan humor.
Inject Ian's Twitter into your life and forever be better for it. Or worse. Or the same, whatever.
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