The other day after reading Scott Christian's post about America's excessive addiction to 3-ply toilet tissue in which he postulates "At the end of the day though, cleaning your backside really shouldn’t qualify as an area of luxury...", I posed this question to him: "Dude, have you ever had hemorrhoids?" He didn't answer me, but I didn't really expect him to.  Bathroom habits and bowel movements are not popular cocktail conversation.  My husband and I observe a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy about it in our house.  8 years together and we've never once shared the bathroom.  We have achieved a comfortable level of physical intimacy that does not include watching each other evacuate our bladders and bowels. However, that does not mean I can't talk about these things with you.

Hemorrhoids, or piles as the British like to call them,  are not a subject many people are willing to talk about freely.  Buying PreparationH or Tuck's Medicated Pads can be a shaming experience, especially when there is the risk of a price check. We, as a nation, may be ashamed of our anuses, but I am not too proud to tell you that I pamper mine. I don't just use the 3-ply toilet tissue.  No sir! I go all out and use the Cottonelle Fresh Flushable Wipes, because, as the marketing materials says "There's nothing like that shower-fresh, clean in-between feeling – for all-over freshness, including our bottoms!"

My aunt, Melantha, for whom the discussion of bowel movements is never off limits, as was evidenced on my 5 day trek through the American southwest with her, my mother and my grandmother (talk about a multi-generational traveling freak show)  is an anus cleansing aficionado. Every morning at breakfast during our trip there would be a frank and detailed discussion about how her bowels were faring while I tried to choke down my Cheerios.  In later years she was to introduce me to colonics.  Let me just say you've not lived until you've had 30 gallons of water shot into your colon and watched last night's lasagna dinner float away through a glass tube.  Yes, they make you watch.  Anyway, Melantha's solved the whole toilet paper issue for herself when she bought one of those Toto Toilets.  You know the fancy Japanese ones that will wash you, dry you, and warm your butt while you read the paper. Let me tell you that the minute I discover that I have $2,000 laying around gathering dust, I'm getting myself one of these babies, and naming it.

If you've never had a case of hemorrhoids  you can't fully appreciate the pain and agony that the simple act of wiping your ass can be.  The whole situation, in and of itself is just one indignity after another visited upon your person.  I was at university in London when I had my first flare up and it actually gave me quite a scare.  I woke up one morning in my flat to discover that my ass was bleeding.  This is not the kind of discovery that a young lady likes to make before she's had her first cup of coffee.  I ran to the phone and rang my doctor's office and arranged for a house call.  (You get house calls with socialized medicine by the by. God bless the socialists!) A couple of hours later the doctor arrived and gave me a quick once over on the couch and with a stern expression on his face he informed me that I had "a nasty case of piles."  He gave me a referral to a specialist and a Valium for my nerves, as I wasn't totally convinced I wasn't going to die of shame.

I scheduled an appointment with the proctologist, a now seemingly defunct title for a  specialty that my grandfather always referred to as "The Rear Admiralty."  The doctor was a nice enough man, and his reassuring Oxford educated accent did wonders to make me feel at ease as I lay prone on his examination table.  I should say he made me feel at ease, at first.  However when he inserted some kind of unholy apparatus with a flashlight attached into my rectum, all bets were off.  He looked kindly at me as he could tell I wasn't the kind of girl who was really into anal play, and said to me "If you feel the need to pass wind at all, that's just fine, you go right ahead."  I was aghast and thinking "Seriously?  We've known each other less than 15 minutes and you're encouraging me to let one rip in your face? I think not.  My grandmother raised me better than that."

When he was finished playing shadow puppets with my anus, he went to a cupboard and retrieved a clear plastic object that bore more than a striking resemblance to a dildo and handed it to me.  He instructed me that I was to lube this little treasure up and slip it in my ass a couple of times a day, with the hope that it would somehow help reduce the swelling in the tissue. Really? I come to this man with a medical problem and I go home with a sex toy.  How on earth was I going to explain this to my nice Libyan boyfriend who had not been given the exceptionally liberal western sex education of an American woman in her twenties?  Easy, I wasn't.  I hid my new implement of indignity with the tampons, where I figured he'd never look, and thus was my introduction to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."