When I was a girl, I was so easily embarrassed that when my mother sent me to buy toilet paper, I’d buy a box of tissues instead. We didn’t have automatic check-outs back then, and the idea that a shop assistant – even a lady – would have proof that I partook of the dirty deed was enough to make me gasp with horror.
But since I became disabled a year and a half ago, I’d estimate that more strangers have seen my anus than Edmund White’s during his bath-house glory days. Rather than cling to the old ways, I’ve thrown caution to the wind and totally seized the initiative. “Can you look at my bum, please?” I inevitably greet the community nurses. I have been reduced from someone whose mother called her “The Camel” due to my extreme continence to someone who thinks about toilet matters for perhaps a third of my waking hours.
The effort and attention other women invest in affairs of the heart, I devote to the monitoring of the private parts. There’s a Jilted John song called “I Was A Pre-Pubescent” and at one point the lyrics go “Fornication, copulation, menstruation, masturbation!” In my case, the re-write would be “Defecation, urination, catheterisation, constipation!” It’s not half as much fun.
