Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [49]
I don’t know how one is supposed to react in that situation. I mean, even if I were a robot, I’d be like, “Sys-tem er-ror . . . oh-my-God.”
So the doctor said, “Listen, Mike, you gotta come in tomorrow morning for what’s called a cystoscopy.” And doctors always dress this stuff up. He said, “It’s no big deal. You come in. They put an IV in. You fall asleep. You wake up. You eat a muffin. You go home.” And I said, “Okay. I’m still a little shaken up by the table incident. But what’s a cystoscopy?”
Then Dr. Del Vecchio picked up a rod about four feet long and said, “This has a camera on the end of it and we stick it through your urethra to look at your bladder.” I thought, urethra, urethra, I know I’ve heard of that part. I glanced quickly to the wall of the giant diagram of the male anatomy and I was reminded that the urethra is a miniscule tube through which I had always peed. It did not seem to have adequate room to house camera equipment or a four-foot rod. And I just nodded and I thought, “I feel like you glossed over a few details in the initial description. I feel like there was too much emphasis on the muffin and not enough mention of the fishing rod you’re sticking into my number three body part on E’s ‘Top One Hundred Sexiest Body Parts.’”
So I woke up the next morning and I felt like I couldn’t breathe and my mom drove me to the hospital and the nurse put in the IV. For a while she couldn’t find a vein, and that’s always fun. It’s just a stranger poking you with a needle and you just have to take it.
You’re like, “Ow!”
Okay.
“Ow!”
Okay.
Eventually she found a vein. Apparently I have one.
While I was under, they found something in my bladder. You know, an item. So they decided to put me under deeper so that they could take it out. So they put me on the hospital equivalent of horse tranqs. When I woke up in the recovery room, I was sky-high with my mom—which was not the first time in my life I’d been high with my mom. But it was the first time she knew. I don’t handle drugs very well. If you’ve ever been in a group of people smoking pot, I’m the guy who says, “Do you guys hate me? Why does my heart hurt? Is that rickets?” I’m not proud of it. It’s just what I am. So I woke up in the recovery room but in my mind I was in a dance club. I shouted, “This place is awesome! We should come here all the time! Dad’s always here!”
And my mom was like, “Shhh!” And I was like, “Do you hate me?”
So after I came down from the drugs, they discharged me from the hospital. And I still didn’t know what had happened, and on the car ride home my mother said, “The doctor found something in your bladder.” Whenever they tell you that, it’s never anything good, like, “We found something in your bladder . . . and it’s season tickets to the Yankees!”
Talk about highs and lows. I was literally the highest I’ve ever been in my life and then I was told I might die. Which is like being handed a pizza and then being shot in the face. So I started crying, and because I was crying, my mother started crying, because crying is like throwing up. It’s a chain reaction.
For a week I had to wait for the results of the biopsy of the item they had found in my bladder. So for a week in my life I thought I might die—which is an incredible experience, if you ever have the chance to try it. You’ll start talking to God even if you’re not sure there’s a God. You’ll talk to anyone who might have more power than you, because you really want to cover