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Andy Borowitz: An Unexpected TwistPart I [beginning to 6 minute mark]So, um, so last fall my wife Olivia and I are getting ready, uh, to go to a party but I’m not really feeling up to it, I’ve been feeling crappy the last few daysI’ve had these weird stomach pains and I’m kinda bloated, I kinda look like I’m in my third trimester and, uh, I’ve been constipated, which is weird for me, I’ve got to say – I just gotta tell you this – I am very regular, okay?and I know that sounds like bragging, um, but as we age,we wear that like a badge of honour so I just … say that So Olivia calls the health insurance hotline that we’ve got and talks to a nurse and she runs down my symptoms for the nurse, and then the nurse asks her to ask me, “When was the last time that you passed gas?”And I realised at this point that my record-keeping on this is terribleSo, she asks “Well, was it within the last 24 hours?”And I think about it and I’m like, “No, I don’t think so”And the nurse says to Olivia, “You’ve got to get him to an emergency room within the next six hours”So, we go to the emergency room, and we check in at the triage unit, which I’ve got to say is not a reassuring name for a unit, at all. It’s like the worse thing to call a unit, in a wayAnd the intake nurse, um, first question she asks me is, “Can you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?” and I say, “Six”, which is a huge mistake because, at that point, an immediate sense of calm and relaxation sets in over my case and they busy themselves with the people who said seven through ten, you know – that’s just the way it worksSo it takes a couple of hours, they finally x-ray me and I’m taken to an examining room and a doctor comes in and this doctor is … twelveI mean, I feel like I’m being waited on at the Apple Store, I’m mean, that’s the only…And I’ve got this big belly, and I say to him: uh, doctor, I say “What’s up with this?” and he says “Well, my diagnosis is distension” and I said “you mean, my stomach is distended?” and he said “That’s correct” Well, clearly I’m not dealing with Dr House hereBut he orders a Catscan and I go through that and then, for the next, you know, couple of hours or so, a bunch of other doctors come into the room and disturbingly, each time a new doctor comes in, he’s slightly higher on the medical hierarchy at the hospitalSo, I’m pretty sure, like, the next person who comes in is going to be … Hippocrates, you know, the father of medicineUm, but, finally, a guy comes in with the Catscan results and he is a surgical residentNow, you know, the only word worse than ‘triage’ is ‘surgical’ because you know something bad is about to happen and he says, “Well, we have good news, in a way, which is we know what’s wrong with you” and I say “Well, what is it?”And he said, “Your colon is twisted and this is something called a ‘sigmoid volvulus’, I mean, I know a lot of you already know what this means, since this is the scientists and all …Basically what this means is the colon has formed a knot – and nothing is going in and nothing is coming out, it’s like … mid-town [4:04]Now, my wife Olivia is a former journalist and she has a knack for asking the perfect question that just gets right to the truth of the matter and she asks “Is he in danger?” and the doctor says “Yes”Now I should probably say at this point, that, at this point in time, Olivia and I have been married for nine months, um, these have been the happiest nine months of my life and, just being with her has erased all the sadness of all the years leading up to this and during those nine months, many times I’ve said to myself “Life is so awesome right now! It would take something really freaky to f-ck this up.”So I say to the doctor “What’s next?” and he says “Well, we have two options and the first option is one we’d rather not do, which is, he said, “Emergency surgery, we go in, we cut out the part of the colon that is twisted and then we sew the two ends back together, and the reason this is not a good option is because, as you can imagine, the colon is a very contaminated part of the body, and when you do emergency surgery in those conditions, the chances of an infection and then, sepsis setting in are pretty high, and that will kill you”So, I said “Well, what’s the other option?”He said, “Well, the other option is that we take a colonoscopy tool with a camera on the end, and we just use it as a tool and we stick it up your rectum and we try to manually untwist your colon and, um, if this works, we will then spend the next couple days in the hospital just flushing out your system, getting your colon nice and sterile, and then on Friday, we’ll do that operation but it’ll be under sterile, optimal conditions and you’ll be good to go.So, I’m like, “Shove the camera up my –ss, let’s go!”So they do it, and thank God – it works! They untwist my colon, I check into the hospital, I’m in a room, they spend the next couple days flushing out my system and by Friday, my colon is clean as a whistle. It’s unbelievable and I go in for the surgery and miraculously, the surgery goes exactly as planned – perfect. [6:52]So I’m in my room and I’m recovering and for the first time I meet my surgeon who has preformed this on me and he’s a very nice Chinese gentleman named Dr Ho and Dr Ho speaks perfect English but he’s chosen to speak it in this very abbreviated, clipped fashion, sort of like ‘Confucius on Twitter’, that’s the only way I can describe itEverything is like 4 characters and then – he’s out!So I asked him, like, “So, when you got in there, what did you do to my colon?”And he said, “Removed two feet”They took out two feet of my colonAnd I’m thinking “That’s a lot of colon to be removed” and I said, “Why so much?”And he said, “Colon was redundant”And that is the extent of my conversation with Dr Ho, he’s out. He’s out to Tweet some more to somebody elseSo it’s awesome, and Olivia takes me home and we’re feeling like we really dodged a bullet but then I get home and I’m not feeling so great, I’m sort of feeling chills and shivers and I get into bed and I sort of pull up the sheets all the way to my chin, sort of like I’m a little kid home from school. I’m feeling bad. And then I notice every time I sit up, I vomit. And this gets worse and worse until … I mean, I know some of vomit occasionally but this was like continuous vomiting. It’s like I’ve just seen a Matthew McConaughey movie or something. It’s just uncontrollable … and so we know something is majorly f-cked up so Olivia takes me back to the hospital, and we go back to the emergency room and I get back to the triage room and the nurse there says, “Can you rate your pain from one to ten” and I’m like “Ten, mother-f-cker!”, which turns out to be the correct answer, by the way, for future reference. [8:55] ................
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