Of all the gall!

Two days ago, I went to the hospital. I've had terrible abdominal pain attacks for about the past ten years (ever since I got married...hmm...), and I always attributed them to a bleeding stomach ulcer, as the pain started around my stomach area. The attacks occured mostly in the middle of the night (either at midnight or at about three), but sometimes they'd hit me just as I was ready to drive to work. These attacks were completely debilitating, causing me to lose color, double over and writhe on the floor, vomit, and produce, uh, intestinal difficulties. Most of the time, the pain would subside in intensity after about an hour-and-a-half, but the attack would take its toll on my body, leaving my dehydrated and exhausted, my stomach still cramping for at least another hour or two.

These episodes happened about once every six weeks, but I never could discern what'd I'd done to bring them about. I used to think it was stress, but I've had them during the summer (when I was off work) and on other relaxing days. I had my last incident two weeks ago, right around midnight, and it was the worst one yet. I thought I was going to pass out from the pain. I could hardly stand. I felt utterly weak and powerless, and I stayed awake that night/morning until about five. I had to call in sick to work--again. After that night of the worst pain I've ever had (tied with the night twenty-five years ago when I got my braces) and the next morning of having to tell my principal that I'd have to miss work for the same reason I've missed it in the past, I was determined to go to as many doctors as I could until I found out what was causing this pain and have it excised.

Lucky for me, I found out on my first try--last week. My doctor told me he thought it could be my gall bladder, that I might have gall stones, and that he wanted the hospital to run a couple of tests on me. The one I had two days ago was a HIDA scan, a procedure in which a radioactive tracer serum is injected into a vein to travel and fill the gall bladder so that an image of the gall bladder can be visualized via a computer. About an hour after the initial injection--and the duct that dumps the bile from the gall bladder into the duodenum--the doctor at the hospital injected me with another serum, this one designed to contract my gall bladder so that the previous serum would eject. This contraction and ejection would show him how effeciently my gall bladder was working. About fifteen seconds after injection, I felt nauseated, and my upper abdomen started hurting, a feeling similar to the pain I felt during my attacks. This time, though, the nausea and pain subsided after a couple of minutes.

About ten minutes later, the serum finally began exiting my gall bladder (and I could feel part of it seeping down through my body--and it was a odd feeling, too), and the doctor told me that my gall bladder should have emptied the serum completely about five minutes sooner--and that my gall bladder was still mostly full; i.e., my gall bladder was not operating at peak capacity. I rose from the table, and he motioned me to the computer to show me the results. My gall bladder was working at 13.8% efficiency--healthy gall bladders operate at 34%.

Before I left, the doctor told me not to hold my two-year-old daughter (or any baby that age or younger) for about twelve hours because I was actually (still) radioactive. Not much, he said, but just enough that he'd rather I be cautious. Wow! Radioactive--that is SO COOL! You know who's radioactive? This guy:

Of course, I wasn't attacked by an atomic arachnid, but--but--maybe I might now have the proportionate strength of a gall bladder! What wonders could I work with that great power! Ooh, better yet, I might have the power to emit radiation at will, making sick my students who refuse to yield to my awesome teacher might. When Penny came home with the kids that afternoon, I tried to emit on Nicholas, but it didn't work. Plus, I wouldn't want to get fired just because some parent didn't understand my methods. Were all my homes now dashed? No! Of course not! I could use my irradiated body to become a true hero to all yellow-skinned, four-fingered folks everywhere!

Wouldn't work, though, as I don't think we have any of those types of people in Philadelphia yet. Maybe, though, I wasn't thinking clearly. Maybe the radioactivity had affected my brain.

I needed to think clearly. Now...let me see. The radioactivity hadn't affected me yet, and it didn't affect my son; maybe, though, it might affect animals. I could irradiate my pet cats with just a touch, and they might mutate into something grand themselves.

Then again, though, there's an equal chance that they could mutate into something terrible, something destructive, something that might terrorize this entire country,

and I wouldn't want that. What to do? One resource left--the internet. I spent the next several hours researching radioactivity. I discovered that Gene Simmons was once radioactive (that might explain the tongue), and so were all the members of the Paul Rodgers/Jimmy Page band The Firm. I delved further and further into my study, and I unearthed a shocking revelation: Marie Curie did not discover radiation, as I was taught in high school in college. Instead, the discovery of radioactivity fell to Henri Becqueral, the man who invented comic books! Alas, he received no recognition for his discovery. Becqueral first published his findings in one of his comic books (where he lettered the words with uranium) instead of in a medical journal, and thus his claims were considered fraudulent; he was booted from the university where he taught (Madame Curie, head of the university's board of directors, saw to that--two years before she published her "discovery"), and he soon died from the deadly combination of radiation and newsprint.

After reading this sad tale, I decided to hang it up. I was never going to gain any powers from my radioactive body, and it was probably doubtful that I--or anybody with whom I came in immediate contact--would grow ill from it either. I went to the kitchen to make coffee for the next morning, and the phone rang. It was my brother. He told me about his upcoming trip to Chicago so he could watch the Cubs lose at Wrigley Field, and while he was talking, I paced around inside the house a few times. I passed behind Penny several times, who then was on the computer, and after my third go-around, she yelled at me to quit coming near the computer. I asked her why, and she told me that everytime I came near the computer, that it stopped working entirely. Huh? Surely she must be kidding. She told me to come near it and see for myself. So, I did.

I've since been banned from the house. I don't know why.