Another Shit Story
Publicado em , por Pedro Couto e Santos
This one goes out in English because I wrote it in English and I don’t feel like translating.
So I’m flying out on one of my frequent work trips and my belly is a little “not well”, but let’s say it’s not terrible, so l feel confident and board the plane without visiting the porcelain throne. I take my seat and buckle up and it starts to become clear that things are going to get worse much faster than I had anticipated.
Now we’re taxiing to the runway and I’m already farting quite badly, but even that isn’t reducing the pressure within my bowel, things are about to get very ugly. I think to myself that all I need to do is wait for take off, and when the plane levels off, I’ll run to the toilet.
As we hit the end of the runway and pull up, I’m already in serious pain, I’m sweating and starting to get a bit nauseated from the whole thing. We climb, and for some reason, the climb seems infinite, maybe because I’m about to shit my pants. The whole time, my brain is going a million miles an hour, trying to control my sphincter and calm myself down until I get a chance to get up and go to the bathroom. None of which is working.
I finally give in to reality, I unbuckle, stand up and walk down the inclined aisle, to the back of the craft. I tell the flight assistant, still strapped to her seat, that I need her to unlock the bathroom for me. She says I’m going to have to go back to my seat and wait, the take off is a bit turbulent, and no one should be walking around. I look deep into her soul, through her eyes and she immediately understands. There is something in humans that makes us sympathetic to one another, when we realize one of us is about to explode into a million pieces of faeces.
She quickly unlocks the bathroom, I get in, strip my pants, sit and unload. I let out a sigh of relief, together with a truly astounding mountain of shit. I can barely breathe from the foul stench, I seem to have brought on board. I don’t know what happened in my digestive system, but I sure am glad to be rid of it.
I wipe, stand, and flush.
And this is when my ordeal starts.
The poop. The gigantic pile of badly formed, horribly stinky, and viscous poop isn’t flushing. Now, if you’ve seen airplane toilets, you know it feels like they could flush you out, if you’re not careful, so you can imagine my panic when the muddy substance I had just released didn’t get vacuumed out immediately.
I think to myself that it must be because the lid is open, so I close it and hit the button. Nothing. I open it and my shit is staring me in the face, defiantly. I feel out of options. I can’t just leave it like this, the smell is unbelievable, and everyone will know it was me. This is going to be the most awkward flight of my entire career. I try a couple of times more, cupping water into my hand and throwing it in, to see if I can dissolve anything. It does not work, that thing is like the Mount Doom of turds.
Finally, it becomes clear what I need to do. I do not want to do it, but I must: I need to use my hands.
I take a few paper towels, thank Zeus I didn’t have to do it barehand, I lean in, trying not to breathe, and I push the hell-spawn that is my own defecation down, closer to the hole, hoping to finally eject it.
For good luck, I close the lid. I press the button and after a few seconds of strange noises, I finally hear it, the satisfying “wuooomppff” of an airplane vacuum toilet flush. It takes a few more operations to be completely rid of it all, but I manage.
I compose myself, wash my hands and leave the bathroom trying to pretend I didn’t just spend ten minutes in there fighting the Dark Lord of the Shits, that I myself had created.
