Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [48]
When I was three years old I came down with a gastrointestinal virus. It came on all of a sudden. My family was all in the TV room in our house and I kept getting up to go to the bathroom. I had been potty-trained days before, so at first they thought maybe I was just showing off. At a certain point, Gina pointed out that I was having diarrhea. Minutes later I was throwing up repeatedly. And then my body went limp and I passed out on the rug. When they got me to the emergency room, Gina couldn’t even get me to stand up on the scale. I was nearly unconscious. My parents were answering questions from the young fresh-faced interns: “Height? Weight? Allergies? Has he eaten anything today?” The question that set my dad off was “Was he breast-fed?”
“What does that have to do with anything? He is dehydrated! Get him an IV and get him in a room and get him a doctor!” My mother likes to point out that “those interns weren’t using their instincts. They were just going by procedure, and sometimes that can be dangerous.” They got me a doctor, a room, and an IV, and in a few hours I was pretty close to my usual self.
I remember from this point on very well, because there was a steady stream of visits, gifts, and attention. Gina read to me. My dad bought me a Curious George doll, which I kept for many years. I got balloons and pizza. Dr. Barrett came by and checked out the wildlife hiding in my ear. I stayed overnight and had a great time. It felt like a sleepover.
The next day I was good as new. Everyone else knew that I had a brush with death, but as far as I was concerned, I was having a pretty good week.
In 1998 I was driving home from college to see my parents for Christmas break when I stopped at a rest area and saw blood in my pee. I knew this could mean about five things and three of them meant I would die and the other two weren’t exactly a trip to the Bahamas.
It was particularly disappointing because sometimes when I’m on road trips alone I’ll have water-drinking contests with myself to see how clear I can make my pee. So I’ll drink all this water and go to the urinal and my pee will be clear and I’ll be like, Bingo! So when it was red, I thought, Oh man. I lost big-time.
I got very anxious. And when I get anxious I sometimes get this shallow breathing thing where I feel like I can’t breathe and then I feel like I’m going to die because breathing is one of the building blocks of living.
I pulled into the driveway about 1:00 a.m. and my dad was sitting up reading. He’s a bit of an insomniac. And I told him what happened. And he got a very grave look on his face because he’s a doctor, so he knows about the Bahamas.
In the morning he took me to see his urologist friend, Dr. Del Vecchio. At the time I didn’t know what urologists do. I’m older now, so some of my friends have gone for prostate exams, but when I was nineteen I was very naïve. In the examination room the nurse had me undress and put on a gown and I sat on that hygienic disposable paper. On the wall of the examination room there was a giant diagram of a penis, with all the parts labeled, and on the counter was a plastic model of a penis that clearly came apart like some sort of sexy science toy puzzle. They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.
After I spent a few minutes staring at penises Dr. Del Vecchio rushed in. He made some obligatory jokes about how bad my dad’s putting was, and then he said, “Okay, Mike, I want you to put your hands on the table.