5. O’Malley’s Mushroom Caps
Chapter 8. Fearless, Honest, Relaxed
Chapter 12. The Yamas and Niyamas
Chapter 16. Belting Out the Bhagavad Gita
Chapter 18. Ayurveda Revisited
Chapter 23. What Would Joshua Do?
Chapter 26. Urine Therapy Virgin
Chapter 30. Becoming Most Real
Appendix 1. Sample Yoga Practice
Appendix 6. Ayurvedic Constitutional Survey
Appendix 7. Ayurvedic Recommendations
There’s surely an uneven power dynamic between one person sitting naked on the toilet and the other hovering above in a dark suit. This is especially and egregiously true if the person sitting is pushing to no avail.
Such was the case as I sat naked in Dr. Brenner’s special post-colonoscopy bathroom. He wanted to speak with me about the results and was already late for his next appointment, so he walked on in and started to chat while I was on the potty. At the end of our talk, he offhandedly said, “If you’re having trouble relieving the gas, we can roll you.”
I was game for anything.
So two nurses laid me out on the crinkly paper of an examining table and rolled me back and forth. Their goal was to move things around and let the gas out.
This worked marvelously, and I was both enormously relieved and atrociously humiliated — until I recognized one of the nurses as the mother of a girl I had a huge crush on in school, and then I was only atrociously humiliated.
Thankfully, though, a dedicated yoga practice, which has included wearing winter gloves and punching a mattress as I shout Sanskrit chants, has cured me of colitis and spared me future humiliations. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
It all started when I was sixteen years old, during the fall of my senior year of high school. I remember being slumped on the couch, watching Laverne & Shirley reruns. Shirley was vacuuming, and I thought to myself, “How does she have the energy to do that? It looks so exhausting.”
I was in bad shape. But I had trouble telling anyone about my embarrassing symptoms, so it took a while for me to tell my family, and then a while for us to find the right doctor.
Eventually we found Dr. Brenner, a gastroenterologist, and he scheduled a battery of tests. At this point the true humiliation began. I was already lethargic and losing weight because my body was not digesting food properly — I weighed 142 pounds, which is not much at six-foot-two — and now I had to undergo colonoscopies. Colonoscopies are supposed to be reserved for seventy-two-year-old men and repeat alien abductees from North Dakota who expect this sort of violation. One time the doctor showed me how much rubber tubing had been involved in that particular day’s probe: a full three feet.
As if the basics of a colonoscopy are not bad enough, during such an exam, when the fiber-optic tube is deep up in there, the doctor has to be able to see the wall of the colon, so he pumps in gas. One time I had trouble relieving the gas, and that’s what led to the rolling incident.
After the tests, Dr. Brenner diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis.
I had colitis because I was a stressed-out kid — I was a straight-A student, the champion debater of New Jersey, and president of the Spanish Club.
Spanish Club might sound quaint, and it was. As president my one responsibility was to coordinate our monthly Spanish dinner. The dinner entailed, basically, getting