A Dance with the Fabled Phantom Poo

I was trying to think of the word that I would use to describe the experience I had in the men’s room this past Friday, but my tumor-destroyed brain couldn’t immediately come up with it, a problem I often have. Finally, one part of my brain found the path to the word stored in my memory somewhere in the deep recesses of another part of my brain and brought it forward. Deeply “unsettling” is the word I would use to describe this experience. “Disturbed” and “scared” are other words that adequately convey my mood as I recall and write down what happened.

It started innocently enough. At about 2:00pm, I had to go poo. For whatever reason, I didn’t have to go at my normal time in the morning. In the time since I had last gone poo, I had a crab cake and cream of crab soup for my previous lunch, orange chicken from my local Chinese place for dinner the evening before, then leftover orange chicken for breakfast, and smoked bbq chicken wings and fries for lunch. Plus, plenty of Halloween candy in between. So, it was past time for my bowels to decide they wanted to get a move on.

I headed over to the men’s room and went to the large toilet in the handicapped stall in the corner of the room. There was always a risk in using this one over the one right beside it, as this one didn’t flush that well, but I had started using it again recently because I began giving comfort more weight over known flushing mechanics in my risk analysis of using a toilet. I didn’t use it for about a year up until August or so because I had massively plugged it up in 2017 to the degree where lots of water spilled over the bowl onto the floor.

When this happened, I was just starting to wash my hands at the sink, and the Building Services Manager walked in right when the sound of water hitting the floor started. He was a gruff guy and rough around the edges and immediately said “SHIT!” I immediately thought “literally and figuratively.” Given how much water started hitting the floor, I thought there could have been a “men overboard” situation, but he said that was not the case when he took a look.

He claimed the poo went down and the reason the toilet plugged was because the diaphragm had worn out, but I knew the reason why was me – I was trying some migraine medicine at the time on the advice of my neurologist and this medicine was causing some nasty, hard poos of a consistency that I feared may plug toilets. I immediately stopped this medicine after this incident.

Plus, I’ve got a long and storied history of plugging toilets, even without medicinal help. My tour de force was at a Wendy’s in Rockville, MD in 2002. I don’t like to use totally public toilets, obviously, but I had just gotten done with a long day of fixing people’s computer problems in the field and had to go to the bathroom before what was going to be a 2+ hour drive home. None of the customer sites were conducive to me doing my business, so it stayed inside me that afternoon compacting.

I didn’t realize it going in, but the design of the old Wendy’s buildings are perfect to get in and out of their bathroom without having to be disturbed, as their bathrooms are in a portion of the building sectioned off from the dining area and adjacent to exterior doors to enter and leave the building. This toilet was a turbo flush toilet, which is rare for a fast food joint and I didn’t realize was one until I flushed it. When I realized it had plugged, which was almost immediately, I just ran straight out of the bathroom, out the exterior door, and into my car and drove off, never looking back or ever returning to the scene of the crime to survey what kind of extraordinary damage I had probably done. Not to add insult to injury to Wendy’s (I like Wendy’s), but the part of the poo that was compacting was probably a McPoo.

Imagine my shock when a year later I was watching The Matrix Reloaded in the theater and the exact scene from Wendy’s played on the screen at the climax of the movie. Instead of streams of toilet water exploding the door and spreading out across the walls and blowing up the building just behind me, it was Neo narrowly escaping streams of fire. I should have filed a lawsuit against the Wachowski’s because they clearly must have seen some surveillance video, or something. It even looks like they give a brief homage to my Wendy’s incident when it starts when the door handle and paint on the door start to melt giving the brief illusion of water even though it’s heat:

Then there’s the fact that I’ve had problems since my VP shunt surgery. The tubing from my shunt is in my peritoneal cavity wrapped around my intestines several times before randomly terminating somewhere. I’ve had random pain down there ever since the surgery and can always feel most stages of digestion of my food as it leaves my stomach and travels everywhere through my abdomen. My poos have been even weirder since the surgery, and I could tell this was going to be a big one.

Back at my work toilet, I lined the seat with toilet paper and sat down. I started pushing, and the first thing that happened was a massive fart. This is normal, at least for me, as I have a superpower of always being able to generate farts at any time. Since I give my colleagues the courtesy of not farting around them at work (at least I try to, anyway), the combined gas that stores up comes out when I’m in the bathroom. When I do this at home, my wife swears one of these times I’m going launch up in the air and fly around in circles like letting go of a balloon left untied at its base for the air to escape.

I have passed on this superpower to both of my children. An analysis of my CT scan from July where they were looking for a hernia due to some of the aforementioned pain shows the unlimited supply of farts in my abdomen. Fart after fart lined up through my large and small intestines look like a bandolier or belt-feed of different ammunition types ready to be used in the fart wars that break out at home between my kids and I:

But, this was the type of sudden power fart like a grenade that displaces the air in the toilet bowl below the butt causing it to woosh out the gap between the toilet seat and bowl on the sides and up the gap near the crotch. In later fall through early spring, this air is normally pretty chilly since the colder, denser air of the room drops into and stays in the bowl. This sometimes causes a little too chilly of a breeze on my nether region, but this was this past Friday, a warm fall day out ahead of a cold front and the air in my building isn’t that great, so the displaced air going up my crotch was refreshing.

I continued pushing, and as the blind turtle started to stick its head out, I could feel this was a very dry poo. This wasn’t surprising since the majority of my stools had been dry the past month thanks to taking antihistamines – the late summer and fall are the worst for allergies for me between the late summer pollen producers such as ragweed and the mold that starts to form on leaves when they fall from trees. This has been an extremely wet summer and fall, so there’s been plenty of mold to go around.

I pushed and pushed, though not as hard as I normally do because apparently, a small hemorrhoid formed several weeks ago, something that I’ve had relatively minor problems with in the past. I figured pushing hard may cause more problems. I also wonder what it may do to my hydrocephalus and brain, although I’ve never been advised not to push hard by doctors.

Eventually, it came out, and after contemplating life for a moment and finding there was probably no more poo to come out, I half stood up to wipe. I’m a stander because I don’t know or want to know how sitters who wipe know that they’re done wiping. I’ve used entire rolls of toilet paper before to wipe from a single poo. So, I wiped, and to my surprise, there was no poo on the toilet paper, a rare treat even for a dry one. I double checked and did a re-wipe, this time digging in slightly deeper and ensuring I rubbed the sandpaper-like toilet paper all around in case I was missing a small cling-on, and it came up completely clean a second time.

What happened next scared me. When I turned around in my half-standing bent-knee position to take a look at the poo, there was none there. The toilet bowl was completely clean. Where did the poo go? I immediately realized I was likely dealing with a phantom poo, the rarest of all poos. Many people don’t even believe phantom poos exist, they’re just too supernatural and fantastic of a concept to be taken seriously, but I encountered them twice as a child back when I was a much cleaner pooper. The poo simply goes straight down the pipe at the bottom of the toilet never to be seen.

Many of those who indeed claim to have encountered a phantom poo actually encountered the more common ghost poo, something probably everyone has encountered at least once in their lifetime. There is a distinct difference between the two. A phantom poo leaves no trace there was a poo, whereas a ghost poo either leaves a skid mark on the toilet before disappearing or some residual on the toilet paper when wiping. Think of the ghost known as Slimer from The Ghostbusters and his ectoplasm trail. He was probably modeled after a ghost poo, but definitely not a phantom poo.

Since the phantom poo leaves no trace that it ever existed, it causes one to wonder if it ever existed at all. I really wanted to verify its existence, so I bent way down to look back in the toilet pipe in the same position I get in when looking for food that my wife has hidden in the back bottom of the refrigerator. I still could not see the poo. I even took the wad of clean toilet paper in my hand and used the bottom of it to push around the toilet paper from lining the seat that had fallen in the bowl to see if the poo was somehow underneath it. It was not.

I then became paranoid. Had the poo somehow snuck into my underwear or pants? I had plenty of room in the handicap stall, so I felt myself up like a TSA agent at the airport looking for contraband, then performed one of my trademarked dance moves (The Lawnmower) in the stall to see if I felt anything drop down one of my pants legs. Nothing. I looked around the whole floor around the toilet including back behind it. There was no trace that a poo had happened other than a lightly itching and burning bunghole. Not even any smell. I hesitantly flushed the toilet, and the water went down normally.

It’s probably been 35 years since the last time I encountered a phantom poo, and I honestly thought I would never have another encounter again given the problems I’ve had with my gut since surgery. Still disconcerted and paranoid that the poo may be hanging around somewhere or that maybe my damaged brain was playing tricks on me, I washed my hands and headed for the door. As I left the bathroom, I swear I heard a soft voice coming from the shadows of the corner singing:

“Softly, deftly, poo poo shall caress you
Fear it, feel it, secretly possess you…”