Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

CHAPTER 6. BATHROOM HUMOR

Leynerseems to have rebounded from his brief period of remorse and sorrow, and is now back to his crazed ways. Tequila in hand, he is delivering a rambling quasi-coherent lecture about cultural differences in post-defecation hygiene. The audience is appalled, yet raptly entranced by his scholarly scatological soliloquy. As Leyner continues, a hand pops up in the back of the room. The hand belongs to Joel Blake, a celebrity orthodontist, who starts to ask a question but begins to stammer as tears well up in his eyes.

Leyner moves through the crowd with the style and empathic grace of Oprah Winfrey, grabs his hand, and says, “It’s okay Joel, you can tell us, you are among friends.”

“I wipe standing up!” Joel blurts out.

There is a cackle from the gallery but Leyner silences the offender with an icy stare.

“We need to honor everyone’s Way of Wiping,” Leyner says serenely, as he hugs Joel.

The bathroom and all that occurs behind closed doors may be the final taboo. Yet when placed in a comforting environment or in a locker room, people will share their secrets often to unfortunate results.

Thanks to our wonderful democratic society, you can do whatever you want. The better question is, Why would you want to drink your own piss?

Drinking small amounts of your own urine is probably safe. It is made up of 95 percent water, 2.5 percent urea, and 2.5 percent salt, other minerals, hormones, and enzymes. Actually, some folks consider it to have therapeutic properties. Ask the Chinese Association of Urine Therapy. They say urine is sterile, antiseptic, and nontoxic.

For serious yoga practitioners, drinking one’s urine is called amaroli. One of the most famous users of urine therapy was the prime minister of India from 1977 to 1979, Morarji Desai. At the celebration of his ninety-ninth birthday, Desai attributed his longevity to drinking urine on a daily basis. But, we plan on sticking to morning coffee, a good glass of cabernet, and an occasional Yoo-hoo, even if it knocks a year or two off our life spans.

• An average fart is composed of about 59 percent nitrogen, 21 percent hydrogen, 9 percent carbon dioxide, 7 percent methane, and 4 percent oxygen. Less than 1 percent of its makeup is what makes a fart stink.

• The temperature of a fart at its time of creation is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

• Farts have been clocked at a speed of ten feet per second.

• A person produces about half a liter of farts a day.

• Women fart as much as men.

• The gas that makes your farts stink is the hydrogen sulfide gas. This gas contains sulfur, which is the smelly component. The more sulfur-rich your diet, the more your farts will stink. Some foods that cause really smelly farts include beans, cabbage, cheese, and eggs. Also soda.

• Most people pass gas about fourteen times a day.

All are important facts, but back to the question: Is it really possible to ignite farts?

The answer to that is yes!

The flammable character of farts is due to hydrogen and methane. The proportions of these gases depend largely on the bacteria that live in the human colon that digest, or ferment, food that has not been absorbed by the gastrointestinal tract before reaching the colon.

There is some danger associated with igniting flatulence. Fraternity guys don’t seem to care.

There is nothing like a long soak in a bath to relax your soul. The problem is that you have to deal with the ghastly sight of your hands and feet after exiting. The simple answer for why this occurs is that our outer layer of skin (the epidermis) absorbs a little bit of water when we soak too long in the tub. Voilá! Old lady flesh!

The skin on the feet and hands is thicker than the skin on the rest of the body and therefore makes any changes more noticeable. As the epidermis expands, the layer below it, the dermis, does not swell, so the epidermis buckles in areas. Lovely, right?

There is no specific course in medical school to deal with all the secretions that you find yourself faced with as a doctor. It is definitely a rude awakening to find yourself being coughed on, spit on, and even urinated on. All doctors have been doused in a variety of bodily fluids.

One wonderful evening in the ER, I heard a nurse screaming. I found her desperately trying to keep a drunk patient who had passed out from hitting the floor. He was not a small man, and the dead weight was too much to manage. The only way I could get him back on the stretcher was to grab him from behind and throw myself on the stretcher with the patient on top of me. Simple. I could then just roll him over. I unfortunately didn’t plan on him using me as a bedpan the instant we hit the bed.

This is disgusting, of course, but when faced with the option of being urinated on or spat on, I would choose urine. No, this is not a fetish. Normal urine is sterile. It contains fluids, salts, and waste products, but it is free of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. It is not always fragrant, but is certainly cleaner than spit. Spit contains large amounts of bacteria and thus is filthy.

It is unbelievable how much information there is available about farts. Flatulence is the subject of numerous medical studies, books, and CDs. One company even makes a fart filter and underpants designed to absorb odor. But among all this gaseous information it always comes back to the bean, the most famous farting food.

Beans contain high percentages of sugars (oligosaccharides) that our bodies are unable to digest. When these sugars make it to our intestines, bacteria go to work and start producing large amounts of gas. We also form gas from other sources, including the air we swallow, gas that seeps into our intestines from the bloodstream, and carbon dioxide formed from saliva reacting with stomach acid.

There is some help available for those who can’t handle their beans. A product called Beano is readily available. Beano contains a food enzyme extracted from mold, one alpha-galactosidase, that helps to break down the complex sugars in gassy foods. Another method is to soak beans before you cook them, as this cuts down on their gas-producing power if you then discard the water. Unfortunately, you also lose some water-soluble vitamins by doing this.

Other flatugenic foods are broccoli, brussels sprouts, cooked cabbage, raw apples, radishes, onions, cucumbers, melons, coffee, peanuts, eggs, oranges, tomatoes, strawberries, milk, and raisins.

Notice the abundance of vegetables on the fart-producing list. That is why those vegetarians are always passing wind in yoga class as they contort themselves into weird positions.

There is a psychiatric illness called coprophagia, the eating of one’s own feces. It is an uncommonly reported symptom that can be seen in patients with schizophrenia, alcoholism, dementia, depression, Kluver-Bucy syndrome (ask Mark), and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Scatolia, the smearing of feces, is often seen in psychiatric hospitals. High-functioning individuals may sometimes exhibit coprophagia as part of a paraphilia or abnormal sexual arousal disorder. There are even some claims that Eva Braun urinated and defecated on Adolf Hitler. Sexy!

You can get very sick by eating feces. It shouldn’t be fatal, but complications from snacking on shit include hepatitis, oral infection, abscess, and a variety of other infectious diseases. Besides that, think of the morning breath.

12:05P.M.

Leyner: Be right there…

Gberg: OK, I gotta run to the bathroom.

12:15P.M.

Gberg: I have returned.

Leyner: Did you wipe standing up?

Leyner: Some people do, I’ve heard…

Gberg: Stop mocking me. You know I am sensitive about being a stander.

Leyner: I’m sorry… you know sometimes I pee sitting down… out of pure laziness.

Gberg: That is what they should teach you in school.

Gberg: Bathroom etiquette.

Leyner: They should teach boys that they don’t HAVE to stand up… that it’s an option.

12:20P.M.

Leyner: When my niece was a little girl she said a great thing once on the way back from a little skiing excursion in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Gberg: And… what were these words of wisdom?

Leyner: It was quiet in the car and all of a sudden she piped up, “I didn’t fart… but I’d open a window if I were you.”

Gberg: With all the new technology, they should make an automatic sensor that senses the gas and opens the window.

Leyner: I hate going into a bathroom in a fancy restaurant where they have an attendant in there.

Leyner: A men’s room seems to be the one place on earth where Emersonian self-reliance should be the rule.

Gberg: I know, I don’t really need assistance getting the paper towel out of the dispenser.

Leyner: There’s really nothing that goes on in a men’s room that I can’t handle myself.

Gberg: You end up feeling so guilty that you have to give the poor bastard a tip.

12:25P.M.

Leyner: You know that expression for waiters and cooks — when they spend their day off at the place they work?

Leyner: Bellman’s holiday or something?

Gberg:??

Leyner: Wonder if there’s an equivalent for men’s room attendants?

Leyner: Look that expression up online, will you… bellman’s holiday.

Gberg: They probably can’t urinate or defecate at home because it reminds them of work.

Leyner: What about the people who check stool samples all day, like at that place Jetti Katz, you know that lab?

Gberg: What the hell are you talking about?

Leyner: There’s a lab I went to once when my cousin, my gastroenterologist, thought I might have picked up some exotic parasite in Tierra del Fuego.

Gberg: Jetti Katz sounds like a performer in the Catskills.

12:30P.M.

Leyner: So he sent me to this lab that specializes in analyzing stool for parasite eggs… Jetti Katz or Jeddi Cats or something like that… some place in upper Manhattan.

Gberg: The Jeddi Cats sound like a band.

Gberg: I love their music.

Leyner: Anyway… they have these women who work there, and what they do all day is handle hot, steaming fresh stool samples. The whole experience is indelible in my brain.

Gberg: Indelible or inedible?

Leyner: First you down some… What’s that laxative they give you?… It has a catchy name.

Gberg: Go-lytely!

Leyner: Works mighty fast.

Leyner: Know what I’m talking about?

Gberg: Nothing light about it.

Leyner: What’s it called? Help me out here.

Gberg: Not Go-lytely?

Leyner: NO.

Gberg: Lactulose, sorbitol, milk of magnesia, cascara, Dulcolax…

Leyner: Dulcolax… I think.

Gberg: Magnesium citrate.

Gberg: Dulcolax, “the Duke.”

Leyner: DULCOLAX, yes!!!!!! Anyway, they make you drink that… then, a dozen or so people vie for three bathrooms. It’s like some debased Japanese game show.

Gberg: We could be huge in Japan.

Leyner: We already are.

Gberg: Did your books sell internationally?

Leyner: That’s the strange thing about Japan. You can be famous there, have malls named after you, etc., etc., and NEVER know it.

Gberg: I am pretty sure there is no Billy Goldberg mall in Kyoto.

Leyner: One of my books has been published in Japan, and all of them in Great Britain, Italy, and France… and Chechnya, I think. I’m like the Dr. Seuss of Chechnya.

We have no pretensions about this book, and we expect it to be found in that precious spot right next to the toilet. For that reason, we fear we need to warn you that sitting too long on the throne may cause hemorrhoids. Unfortunately, this one’s not an old wives’ tale.

Hemorrhoids, or piles, are abnormally swollen veins in the rectum and anus. They are similar to the varicose veins you might see on a person’s legs at the beach. It’s estimated that about one hundred million Americans are currently suffering from hemorrhoids. More than half of the U.S. population develops hemorrhoids by age fifty. The most frequent causes of hemorrhoids are constant sitting, straining with bowel movements (from constipation or hard stools), prolonged sitting on the toilet, severe coughing, giving birth, and heavy lifting. It has also been suggested that the Western diet, which is rich in processed food and lacking in fiber, contributes to hemorrhoids.

Sitting on the toilet too long is problematic because this is the only time that the anus truly relaxes, allowing the veins down there to fill completely with blood. To prevent this problem, you should move your bowels as soon as possible after the urge occurs. If you cannot go right away, pick up our book (we expect it to be toilet reading) but read as you walk. You can always return to finish the job.

We don’t want to create any cultural stereotypes here, but most of the bathroom questions came from folks from Down Under. Yes, two Aussie friends seem to ask many questions about their bowels.

Everything that happens in the intestine seems to have something to do with the production of gases and sulfur compounds. The bacteria inside feces is what makes it smell so bad. Specifically, the bacteria produce various compounds and gases that lead to the wonderful smell of a bus station bathroom. The smell of your stool can be affected by medical conditions or your diet. Fatty stools and bloody stools are known to be particularly malodorous. In the hospital, a large, ripe poo is known as a code brown. How’s that for real insider knowledge?

Some people seem to be obsessed with the creation of the perfect poo. My brother even called me in to examine his works of art, a true bonding moment for young boys. Another friend described his perfect moment for us when he produced the cobra — one that coiled around and poked its head out of the bowl. There is something about “dropping the kids off at the pool” that makes us all smile. So, laugh if you must, but we’re sure you’ve wondered why some poos are floaters.

It is gas that makes poo float. Increased levels of air and gas make it less dense and therefore cause it to float.

It is very common to have people ask about the color of their stool to figure out how it relates to disease. There are definitely some color changes that can be cause for concern, but in general assessing stool color is no exact science.

Feces are mostly shades of brown or yellow because of the presence of an orange-yellow substance called bilirubin. Bilirubin combines with iron in the intestine to give the combo a beautiful brown color.

Poo does, however, have a rainbow of possibilities:

Black:

A black stool (melena) can mean that blood is coming from the upper part of the gastrointestinal tract, the esophagus, stomach, or first part of the small intestine. Other things that can cause black stool are black licorice, lead, iron pills, Pepto-Bismol, or blueberries.

Green:

Green, leafy vegetables contain chlorophyll, which can color the stool green. Green feces can also occur with diarrhea if bile passes through the intestine unchanged. In breast-fed babies, green stool is a normal occurrence, especially right after delivery.

Red:

Maroon stool or bright red blood in poo usually suggests that the blood is coming from the lower part of the GI tract. Hemorrhoids and diverticulitis are the most common causes of red blood in the stool. Beets and tomatoes can also make stools appear reddish.

Gray:

Diseases of the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder can cause pale or gray stool.

Yellow:

One condition that can cause yellow stool is a parasitic infection known as giardia. Giardia also causes significant diarrhea. Another cause of yellow poo is a condition known as Gilbert’s syndrome. This is a fairly common genetic disorder that causes an increase in your level of bilirubin. Gilbert’s syndrome is rarely dangerous.

Some people like to think of their lower gastrointestinal tract as a one-way street. One time during a rectal examination during a trauma, a frightened young man screamed out as the doctor was placing his finger in the man’s rectum, “Whoa, that’s an exit!”

Flatulence follows that same rule. Gas goes out or it simply goes away.

Seawater is more than three times as concentrated as blood. Humans shouldn’t drink salt water because it forces your body to deal with a solution that is more concentrated than its own fluids. In order to get rid of the excess salt, your body must excrete it through the kidneys as urine. The kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water, so if you drink seawater, you’ll be peeing a lot and losing an excess of water. This would cause your body to become dehydrated, leaving an excess of sodium in your bloodstream. Water would then leave all your other cells to enter the bloodstream. This would cause the cells to shrink and malfunction. As a result, muscles would become weak and ache, the heart would beat irregularly, you would become confused, and ultimately you would die.

Drinking urine is probably safer than seawater, but the catch-22 is that if you don’t have any water to drink, you will become dehydrated and not produce any urine. The best bet is to not get shipwrecked and if you do, hope for rain.

By doing research we found reports of gonorrhea, toilet-seat dermatitis (infragluteal eczema), ascaris lumbricoides (roundworm), and enterobius vermicularis (pinworm). We know what you are thinking. After carefully washing our hands, we went back to our computers and came across more information.

Yes, occasionally you can catch something from a public toilet seat but this isn’t all that common. Work, on the other hand, may be worse for your health than toilet seats. A microbiologist at the University of Arizona, Charles Gerba, found that the typical office desk harbors around four hundred times more disease-causing bacteria than the average toilet seat. Here is the bacteria count:

telephone: 3,894 germs per square centimeter

keyboard: 511 germs per square centimeter

computer mouse: 260 germs per square centimeter

toilet seat: priceless

In our house, we call it the coffee alarm. Nothing is more reliable.

Coffee is definitely known to have a laxative effect. The caffeine in coffee speeds up every system in the body including the bowels. But when used excessively, caffeine can interfere with the bowels’ normal contractions and lead to constipation. Decaffeinated coffee does away with the caffeine but it still acts as a bowel irritant.

There is nothing better, for some, than the morning cup of joe and a cigarette, followed by the “morning constitutional.” Caffeinated drinks and nicotine have a laxative effect probably because they stimulate nerves that increase intestinal contraction, so if you had a block of cheese for dinner, this is a wonderful remedy.

If you want to have a cigarette and coffee for breakfast, make sure that you have a clean toilet nearby.

Sorry, pal, sometimes there just aren’t medical explanations for things. Nobody in medical school explained why you get the urge to urinate when you pour gas into the generator.

Going to bed at camp always felt like a risky time. The fear of having someone dip your hand in warm water and waking in a puddle was terrifying. There is no clear medical proof to this camp myth but there may be some science behind it. It is known that when someone has trouble urinating, a warm bath can sometimes make it easier to go, perhaps because of a reduction of pressure in the urethra with the increased body temperature during a bath. A study from Egypt called “Role of Warm Water Bath in Inducing Micturition in Postoperative Urinary Retention After Anorectal Operations” described this so-called thermo-sphincter reflex in 1993. We still don’t know if the hand dip works the same way, but it sure would be funny to picture an Egypitian in the laboratory sneaking up on sleeping volunteers to try to get them to wet their beds.

My junior high school biology teacher instilled fear in our young hearts when he told us that if we got into a car accident with a full bladder, the bladder could rupture. He was right. In general, a full bladder ruptures more easily than an empty bladder.

This doesn’t mean that your bladder will explode if you hold in your urine because your dad, husband, or brother won’t make a pit stop.

Our bodies have a nonvoluntary reflex mechanism to prevent our bladder from getting too distended, called the micturition reflex. When our bladder gets distended, there are stretch receptors in the bladder wall that let us know that it is time to go. As we all know, this is not the most comfortable sensation (if you wait too long). These sensory neurons cause contractions that can become strong enough to overcome the muscle tone holding the urethra shut and release all that urine.

Borborygmi: borbo•ryg•mi; noun, plural: rumbling sounds caused by gas moving through the intestines.

Certainly not a word learned in medical school, or that can be easily used in a sentence.

These rumbling sounds are a normal part of digestion. They are generated from muscular activity in the stomach and small intestine as the food, gas, and fluids are mixed together and pushed through the intestine. This squeezing of the muscular walls is called peristalsis. Many people associate these sounds with hunger because they are louder and echo more when the intestine is empty. Yum!

9:07A.M.

Gberg: Good morning.

Leyner: All the best to you and yours… give me one moment, just finishing an e-mail…

Gberg: I’m just making a coffee.

9:10A.M.

Leyner: OK…

Gberg: Coffee and pizza for breakfast.

9:15A.M.

Leyner: I had a Slim Jim and a fermented mare’s milk.

Gberg: It’s hard to find good fermented mare’s milk these days.

Leyner: People should drink the milk of as varied a miscellany of mammals as possible.

Gberg: Did you ever sample human breast milk back in the day?

Leyner: All those diverse antibodies are good for getting an immune system ready for the coming apocalyptic flu pandemic.

Gberg: I live in fear of the avian flu.

Leyner: No… never sample that mamma milk… I’ve tried to keep the birthing process and my sex life as far apart as possible.

Leyner: The whole avian flu thing seems like some Hollywood pitch… like Hitchcock’sThe Birds and…

Gberg: So, my brother, we need to finish this bitch and move on to bigger and better things.

Leyner: What was that epidemic movie?

Gberg:Outbreakwith Dustin Hoffman.

Leyner: What are doing right now… are we IMing about something we need to be IMing about?

Gberg: Not yet, really just getting loose.

Leyner: Otay.

Leyner: Tomorrow seems not so good to work… is Thursday any good?

Gberg: I am doing stretches at the same time.

Leyner: Tell me about Thursday.

Gberg: Can’t do Thursday. Working.

9:30A.M.

Leyner: One of those six-pack ab cover mags… that men should do the recumbent bike in the gym and not the regular one that puts pressure on the cajones and the tender perineum.

Gberg: There is something about bike riding that can damage the pudendal nerve and affect your front end lifter.

Gberg: The tender perineum — who wrote that? Fitzgerald?

Leyner: I love when you conflate urology and heavy machinery.

Leyner:“The Tender Perineum”… yes, yes… the unfinished F. Scott masterpiece…

Gberg: I never knew I could conflate.

Leyner: Poor slob never had the chance to work out the denouement…

Leyner: I heard some woman talking about morning erections the other day…

Gberg: Did you just spontaneously spell denouement correctly?

Leyner: At a supermarket in L.A.

Gberg: I was wondering where you heard that?

Leyner: Yes, I spontaneously spelled it correctly… it’s the coffee.

Gberg: I didn’t know that people actually spoke in L.A.

Leyner: This woman… enormous plastic L.A. tits and the face of a wizened gargoyle… said she won’t touch a morning erection… because it’s not “for me” (she said)… it’s just a “reflex.”

9:35A.M.

Leyner: I guess people want to feel they’ve “earned” a change in some other human’s physiognomy.

Gberg: L.A. is such a bizarre place. New Yorkers would take advantage of any erection. Why waste a good thing?

Leyner: You know those commercials for that new Viagra… whatever it’s called?

Gberg: Cialis. Damn, those people seem relaxed and happy.

Gberg: We should start our own pharmaceutical company.

Leyner: Why do they say — at the end of that ad — that you should report erections that last over four hours to your doctor?

Leyner: Maybe you should report them to the police?

Leyner: What’s the danger of a four-hour erection anyway?

Gberg: Priapism, my friend, priapism.

Gberg: Very painful and can cause permanent damage to the penis.

Leyner: Can you get a permanent erection?

Gberg: Me, personally?

9:40A.M.

Leyner: That’s funny.

Leyner: Porn stars are said to be able to get their erections back quickly… it’s a vocational skill in high demand in the industry…

Leyner: What accounts for the difference in the refractory time for various men?

Leyner: Is that what that’s called?

Gberg: It sounds so scientific.

Leyner: That’s the right term! I just looked it up. I’m so smart… Don’t you think?

Gberg: You could write a scientific

article, “The Refractory Erectile Period in the Porn Industry.”

Gberg: Just as important as making it go up is making it go down. For those embarrassing public moments.

Leyner: Speaking of porn.

Leyner: Did we ask this in the book: Can women ejaculate?

Gberg: All we are doing is speaking of poop, porn, and penises.

Gberg: So sophomoric.

Gberg: Yes, and they can.

9:45A.M.

Leyner:… that we’re hard-wired to launch our genes into the future before we decay in a puddle of excrement and putrescence???

Leyner: You think THAT’s sophomoric?

Leyner: That’s the whole comic tragedy of life!

Leyner: And the central thesis of our book, yo.

Gberg: What is the thesis of our book?

Leyner: The intertwining cosmic threads of poop and porn.

Leyner: That’s string theory, ever hear of it?

Gberg: I am very slow on the keyboard this a.m.

Gberg: I think my head is going to explode.

Leyner: That we valiantly attempt to create poetry and architecture and pass along culture and bequeath our genetic heritage, ALL in the face of certain decrepitude and the abject indignities of old age and DEATH.

Leyner: It’s a grim struggle each and every day to maintain my dinginity in the face of “reading glasses.”

Leyner: Dignity.

Leyner: I misspelled in my passion.

Gberg: Hold on 1 sec.

9:55A.M.

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