When removing hemorrhoids feels like vacation
“I just feel like when I am OUT of my house — and, like, IN the world again — I’m like YESSSZZ,” my friend Jane told me several weeks ago after I picked her up from an appointment in Stamford. She’d been stuck at home for a long time.
“I mean, I’m so good OUT there in the world!” she told me as she got in the car, all jazzed up. Apparently Jane even had the receptionist in stitches. “People like me, I’m dynamic — which is why it is killing me to be stuck at home all day, you know?”
I do know. Jane has three kids at home and a husband who travels: You’ve got to jailbreak that scene every now and then, I get it.
But when you consider the nature of this outing, Jane’s predicament takes on new meaning: Her appointment was to have her hemorrhoids removed. This was the reason she needed me to drive; it was unclear whether she would be able to sit upright on the way home. It was also the reason she was so happy to be out of the house.
“The proctologist said I had the ‘bunch of grapes’ hemorrhoidal presentation,” she gushed.
And this is when you’ve got to put down the laundry basket and take a minute, folks.
When going to have your rectum examined for hemorrhoidal extraction proves to be an exciting outing, it’s time to regroup.
We’ve all been there: the root canal that proved to be the most relaxing part of your day and your only chance to sit down; the times you got to eat out for lunch while working for a professional establishment where you could go to the bathroom alone.
But I’m done with saying that I’m blessed to be at home with my kids because let’s be clear: No.
There are no more lunches out or salad bars with cubed beets and green goddess dressing; you’re lucky if you get a yogurt in sweatpants by 2 p.m., as you lay hostage to the never-ending laundry; the forms; even the stupid cars require upkeep. That leaves you standing at the gas station, looking at fuel prices that might dry out all the money you once earned, which you don’t anymore, because gone are the days with a 401(k), yearend bonus and performance reviews. And then you realize someone is honking at you.
Take all of that and magnify it by fifty for anyone who tries to work from home.
“Mom, you write for Greenwich people about how weird your life is,” my 12-year-old daughter Selma told me recently. “That’s not work.”
But the point is, whenever I step away from my routine, my house and the physical and mental drill of the in-sand-outs of my current “cycle of life,” I am blown away by how important it is to do so.
No matter what I’m doing when I get away.
Which brings me to this year’s vacation.
Selma’s school has two weeks off in March, so Ian and I decided to take her to Bonaire, a small Dutch island in the Leeward Antilles. It is a mecca for wind sports — like, windsurfers are hanging in the airport when you arrive. It blows upward of 29 knots daily from March through June — but that’s all Bonaire’s got going on.
It’s pretty much a onehorse town, or rather, a one-donkey town — because Bonaire is also known for its oddly large population of wild donkeys that wander the wind-swept wastelands of cacti deserts.
“Mom, what the hell,” Selma said, horrified, as we drove away from the airport into the grim landscape. Going to the tropics, for Selma, meant pina coladas on a lush tropical beach, not this.
After three days of Selma refusing to seen with us, I decided to take a day off to do something with my daughter. It was her vacation, after all.
We rented a car and drove to the northern part of the island, where there are several famous diving spots. Bonaire is also known for its coral reefs, offering some of the most amazing underwater spectacles in the world, including the site at the renowned 1,000 Steps beach.
“I’m not walking onethousand steps, mom,” Selma told me bluntly.
“It’s probably not really a thousand steps, Selma,” I said.
“Then why is it called one-thousand steps, Claire?” she snapped back.
Most of the diving spots are located at the bottom of a tiny cliffside road, which means you have to scramble down steep paths to get to the water. One of the most popular is 1,000 Steps, which turns out has only 67 steps.
As a peace treaty, I told Selma I would take her for ice cream after our excursion, except we appeared to be lost. And as our cliffside road narrowed, I started to notice an undecipherable traffic sign that kept reappearing.
“Selma, can you look up what that sign means, it’s the third one now in a mile,” I said.
When I heard Selma hit the floor laughing, I knew we were in trouble.
“Mom, it says, ‘Do Not Enter’,” she said. “I think this is a one-way road.”
But the road was too narrow to turn around, and driving backward would mean falling off a cliff, so we inched forward at 5 mph while sweating bullets
“There has to be an intersection at some point,” I told her.
That’s when Selma noticed the road signs were getting weirder and more primitive the farther we drove. Little rocks painted white started to line the road with Dutch words we couldn’t decipher and all with explanation points, which was not a good sign. The rocks were interspersed with drawings of stick figures that appeared to be jogging, with a large slash through them.
“No jogging?” Selma was confused. “What?”
Then we hit a sign surrounded by barbed wire that looked as if it marked the end of the earth. It said “NO DIVING, NO SWIMMING, NO FIRE/SMOKING, BOATS ONLY AFTER PERMISSION” — in three languages.
That was when we realized we had been driving through a crude oil derivative facility owned by the Republic of Venezuela.
“How au courant,” Ian said when we got back. Turns out U.S. senior officials were already feeling out the Venezuelan oil situation in reaction to Ukraine and were one step ahead of us — but hopefully with better road signs.
And yet despite the toxic smell, terrible roads, primitive signs — along with the ubiquity of hegemonic struggle and global nuclear tension everywhere, Selma and I couldn’t stop laughing.
Because, let’s face it, when bad traffic signs and a oneway cliffside road leading you to a dictator’s state oil holding facility (which suddenly looks a lot better than that other dictator’s oil company) turns out to be your vacation, well, you’ve got to just run with it.
Even if all signs tell you not to.