WARNING: The following is a really, really gross story. It may even qualify as "beyond gross." It also: signifies nothing, gives you wayyyy too much information, and is told by a total idiot. Its sole redeeming trait is that it involves a scenario we've all feared before — the one where you get a tampon stuck up inside you for a treacherously, perilously long period of time — and it has a (marginally) happy ending. Read at your own risk, folks. I'll tell you if I get Toxic Shock Syndrome!

It was a beautiful week and a beautiful weekend. It was verdant, sun-dappled, horticulture-redolent, exfoliated, affluent, groomed, merry, relaxed, pressed, aspirational, and at its beginning, even fragrant. (That would change.) It was all so dizzyingly gorgeous I could feel a low-grade panic trickle through my chest. But it was all good.

"Moe," my friend John asked. "Do you want half a Vicodin?" I did indeed.

I was at my best friend's wedding. As my heels dug into the soft mud beneath the outdoor pews, I could feel my period start. I hate my period more every time it comes. It comes a lot these days, every two or three weeks. I assume my uterus has put itself on a fast-track to complete the mandatory number of eggs required to call it quits and resign itself to waiting for death. But god, in the meantime, what a nuisance.

I could reproduce with John. He likes drugs and is writing a piece on a surgeon who conducts head transplants. Apparently the downside of a head transplant is that full-body paralysis is an unavoidable side effect. Whatever; I read a story about a perfectly mobile woman who sat on the toilet for two years, who sat on the toilet so long she became stuck; alone with her mind and the receptacle for her gross bodily functions. Yes I'm being glib! I just had half a Vicodin, but this I can say in all earnestness: I would not miss a single physical sensation involved with getting my period. I just got it. Thanks Vicodin!

The evening progressed gaily. I bought tampons and made jokes and smoked cigarettes and partook of a very open bar. At one point I leaned back into a candle and set my cardigan on fire but everyone laughed it off. At another point an old paramour showed me a picture of his 13-day-old child — so you've averted nuclear holocaust! I laughed — and told him about a recent abortion and he told me solemnly it was a shame because I'd "be a good mother" and I naturally laughed that off too. I made out with John and he told me he couldn't take me home because he felt that the girl he was dating he could actually see marrying some day, and I laughed that off — was there another option? —and apologized for my behavior and called it a night. There was no place to go, though, so I took my bleeding self to the train station to wait for a train back to the city.

Transit stations at 2 a.m. are invariably cold and populated by desperate people gone crazy from being prodded every time they fall asleep. They are what my psychographic imagines it is like to wait for death. Missing a train used to distress me gravely for these reasons, but I am old enough to know the Amtrak police have no sympathy for the distresses of my psychographic, and really, why should they. So I bought my ticket and sat calmly, curled my legs inside my hoodie for warmth, and resigned myself to five hours of misery lite. Some actually interesting things happened during those five hours, but the important part is that at some point in my fatigue I inserted a new tampon without removing the first.

The week proceeded with a routine debauchery that reflected the tone of the weekend that had begotten it. I went on a date on Sunday night, and a book party on Monday after which I ended up fucking a friend, and a bar on Tuesday after which I ended up fucking an old fuck buddy, and by Thursday night I'd washed my sheets and shaved my legs and gotten a facial and my period was still hanging around, so I went home early and decided to wait until the period had ended before attempting any more pointless copulation. I don't particularly like period sex to begin with, but this was a most foul period, heavy and brown and rotten-smelling; the sort of period that is trying to tell you something, if you believe in that sort of thing, which I don't, mostly because I am lazy. By Friday night it had still not passed and I woke Saturday morning to find, much to my chagrin, that I'd stained the sheets again. "I think it was pretty good because you said, 'That was awesome,'" sex partner d'giorno told me. I didn't remember. I ran to the bathroom to change my underwear.

By Sunday the stench had soured further. We took a long walk through the park and joked about how ill-attuned we were to things of "beauty." Beauty, how it is wasted on us. Beauty, how it fills me only with dread. "My senses are alive to three things," he said. "Stylish prose, good conversation, and the female body."

That's because he has never gotten a fucking period, I thought.

He was going on a date with a 22-year-old, he felt compelled to offer. Good. 22-year-old menstrual blood does not smell like this. It smells bad, sure, but it is at least mostly red. Don't lose your affinity for the female body. You have plenty of time to knock one up and watch it morph into something totally alien, then splatter out a whole mass of fluids and split open to yield one of those babies you are so fond of eyeing warily on the streets of Park Slope, as well as some inadvertent fecal matter.

I went home alone with my odors. He joked that he hoped I didn't get pregnant and bring about some "My Two Dads" scenario with dude #2. Ha ha ha, I thought. In My Two Dads, the mom got to be dead. I would not get that luxury.

By Monday it occurred to me it might be a bacterial infection, which I'd deserve, or some other sort of sexually transmitted disease, which I would also deserve, and that I ought to make an appointment with a gynecologist, which was true even before I started emitting the thin brown fluid of stench. The flow had slowed to a chronic drip — Drip! there's an STD named after that, right? — but the blood itself had gotten somehow older and fouler. On Tuesday I asked Anna for a day off to go to the gynecologist, grousing for a moment on my symptoms.

ANNA: you don't have a tampon stuck up there do you?
ANNA: like an old one?

I think my mind had entertained this notion, though somehow I expected that gravity, intent as it was on imposing its will on the rest of me, would have expelled the thing by now. But no, on further reflection, it made sense. I didn't work on the rest of me like I performed Kegels. There wasn't a whole lot else I could do, sitting on the couch all day. I pondered buying lube and rubber gloves and a six-pack of beer and attempting to dig it out right then. But it had been there nine days, and the primaries were on. I bought only beer. I drank two and a half. I fell asleep. The next morning I awoke. And smelled.

MOE: i think i actually must have a tampon stuck up me

ANNA: really

MOE: yeah after crappy hour i'm going to get some gloves on and get this shit out

ANNA: oh god

While cursing the gentleness of our anti-antibacterial Whole Foods soap, I devised a way around my lack of latex gloves. Condoms! Finally, a use for them.

I stuck one on my finger and one on my thumb and did my best to rub off the lube. Dooce came on the TV. I had been meaning to watch, but whatever. Progress seemed imminent, and six condoms later, it was. The tampon emerged, grayish brown and bloated like a corpse in the harbor. I carried it, fingers still in condoms, toward the toilet.

"It's a good thing you don't have a dog!" Anna said brightly when I relayed the news.

"Why?"

"Dogs always like to find this stuff and carry it around."

"Oh my God Anna, you think I would just throw that out? No, I flushed it. I flushed it THREE TIMES actually."

"Oh right, I forgot your policy on that," she said.

"But hold on," I panicked. "I had sex three times with that thing. Do you think it absorbed a bunch of sperm? Do you think I should get Plan B? Holy shit, you think I'm already pregnant?"

"NO!" she said automatically. "Sperm can't survive that. It's toxic. I'm pretty sure those sorts of conditions would kill the sperm."

"Like all the bacteria would kill them off?" I asked moronically.

"I don't know. I mean, maybe you should get Plan B," she said.

My roommate overheard us.

"Dude, if you managed to get pregnant with a super absorbency tampon stuck inside you the whole time, you have to have it, I don't care," she said.

"Dude, that is the most retarded thought ever. Ever."

Image: A Tampon Applicator [Flickr]

The night I met the guy I'm currently dating, he made me show him my driver's license to prove that I was the twenty-six I said I was instead of the twenty-two he insisted I must have been. Months later in our relationship, I had a sudden, belated pang of fear that he secretly wished I was twenty-two, and asked him why he'd thought I was. "Your skin. It's like... perfect," he told me. "Most twenty-six year olds already have some lines."

"Fuck you," I said, as this was clearly a bald-faced lie designed to make me feel better about my pukish blend of cigarette lines and acne scars, dingy blackheads and new, oozing zits. Then I remembered that I didn't have those anymore. I'd been using Retin-A Micro for the past year. Had it finally actually worked?

My acne had never been the kind that begets, like, pockmarks or anything, but it was bad enough to spend what seems like at least the plurality of my waking hours picking at. I consistently had a significant zit or two plus assorted clogged pores and blackheads (with that number tripling or quadrupling just in time to make me feel even more awesome about myself during PMS week) that I loved nothing more than to squeeze and poke and prod. Nothing, after all, is more satisfying than the sound a really good one makes upon giving up the white stuff. Other, that is, than the sight of said stuff splattering the mirror! So yeah, I had acne scars. Duh.

I hadn't considered using a prescription acne product before my friend Heather's boyfriend left a tube of his Retin-A Micro at her house. (Yeah, gay.) I used it just to see what would happen, and woke up with blissfully plump, radiant skin. It had also cleared up the zit problem, albeit very temporarily. What the fuckery was this? I needed some of this shit! I needed to do it. For me. When's the last time I did something for me? Like, never. Or, you know, like yesterday. But whatever. I wanted to be that girl with the perfect skin. I deserved it.

Retin-A Micro's active ingredient is a retinol called tretinoin that—and don't sue me, I'm a layman and this is to the best of my understanding—basically causes your skin to shed and renew itself at a much faster rate than it normally would, which means that it doesn't have enough time for the excess yuck that causes acne to get trapped between the layers. It's applied at nighttime, right between face wash and moisturizer. This means you have to learn to wash your face at night, even when shitfaced. I'm not saying this was easy.

The information on Retin-A Micro's official website tells you that you can expect all minor irritation as well as most of your acne symptoms to go away in two to seven weeks. This is a filthy lie. I wanted to wear a paper bag over my head for the first three months, despite using it only every other night and with copious quantities of moisturizer. The flaking, cracking, itching, and redness described so matter-of-factly on the website as a typical side effect was gruesome. I would wake up in the morning with shiny red patches of dead skin too tender to pull off concentrated around my chin and mouth area that would, over the course of the day, flake off onto my clothes like charming little snowdrifts of face-dandruff. And if you miss a spot in applying your sunscreen at the beginning of the day it will immediately turn the color of cancer.

The other thing I experienced was "purging." This meant that my acne was worse than it's ever been in my
life during the weeks the Retin-A Micro furiously sloughed layer after layer of my skin off to reveal all at once the new, exciting pustules that had been lurking there all along, waiting to surface gradually and slowly wreck my life. First, I stopped leaving the house altogether. Then I started avoiding mirrors. This, too, was something I deserved. Beauty hubris had gotten me here and I would be made to suffer for it.

After three months, things were better but not great. I had fewer zits. There were moments when my skin was perfectly clear and beautiful. I also spent about fifteen minutes every morning meticulously rubbing off the lovely, flaky, dead-skin beard that had surfaced around my jaw line overnight, and my previous obsession with squeezing blackheads morphed into a new obsession with searching out and removing errant skin-flakes. I also experienced acute sensitivity. After spending an ill-advised night making out with my poorly-shaven Italian ex-boyfriend, he gasped at the sight of me under the bright, florescent lights of the Dunkin' Donuts that was our eminently refined post-makeout ritual.

"I marked you all up!" he whispered in my ear. "Your neck looks like you barely escaped from the trailer park alive." Upon inspection, I saw that he was correct. My poor little faccia was all tore up; red and angry-looking. "Fuck you, Jason. We're never making out again."

Abstaining from makeout sessions with coarse-haired exes was not the only concession I had to make for Retin-A Micro. I also had to give up all but my gentlest face products, switching from the Dr. Hauschka line to Purpose. I knew by now that exfoliation was a bad idea, as were professional facials, going to sleep in my makeup, and sharing a girlfriend's Queen Helena Mint Julep mud mask. My skin may have finally begun to look like porcelain, but it was just as fragile.

I hardly noticed the slow tapering-off of Retin-A Micro's side effects or the slow increase of its benefits, but somewhere along the line, it started working for me. My skin looks better now than it did when I was in high school. While I still get the occasional pimple, it goes away quickly and it's never part of a larger trend of bad skin like it used to be. Also, Retin-A Micro's sloughing action does an even better job on wrinkles and skin texture than it does on acne. My face is smooth and even-toned, and far less reactive to stress or stubble than it used to be. It seems to be on my side again, or maybe on my side at last.

That being said, I'm really, really, really vain now, like the first girl in high school to stop eating things. And that, in reality, is probably uglier than a little bit of the old pizza-face. Oh well!

This is a post about hemorrhoids. Does that gross you out? Because guess what, someday you might have a human being burst through your pussy and you will probably crap all over it in the process, so grow up. Our bodies are gross. This column is about that. But it is also a touching tale of a doctor named Wang, and how he liberated the bowels of the woman he loves. And no it was not written by me, it was written by someone we'll call Poshterior Spice, and you can thank Intern Cheryl for the high art.

Who had printed that? Must have been Star. How awful for her. Because let's face it, while all cancer is horrific anal cancer has the added bonus of being really really really embarrassing. The only disease I can think of that is actually more embarrassing than anal cancer is Elephantitis of the balls, which is, at least, fun to say. I bet Farrah first discovered she had anal cancer just like this I thought moodily, sitting on the toilet. The stars, so like us! I pictured her all skinny and scared, clutching a piece of soiled toilet paper and wondering if she could trust her doctor or make him sign a nondisclosure agreement.

I decided I would not tell anyone about what I had seen in the bathroom. I intuitively grasped that "I have unexplained rectal bleeding," is not a phrase that anyone wants to hear. The Internet was of little help: My rectal bleeding could be caused by hemroids, it said, but hemroids are more of a male problem. What I probably have is anal cancer.

I would just wait it out, I said to myself, and adopted the strategy, oft-employed by those of us with insufficient healthcare plans, of deep denial. Either the condition, whatever it was, would go away, or rivers of blood would come pouring out my anus and I'd be forced to take action. I conducted the rest of the day's activities with the solemn dignity of Mandy Moore in Walk to Remember, taking care to be extra pleasant to my coworkers so that they would say nice things about me when I died (of unknown causes).

Several days passed, and I forgot all about the blood and the cancer. I resumed being antisocial and sarcastic at the office. Then, perhaps inevitably, I had to shit again.

That night I woke up from a dream about a picnic hosted by Ryan O'Neal sweating and panicked. I dialed the hospital and was assigned an appointment with a Dr. Wang. I joked on the phone that this will be the first wang I've ever had in my butt. Silence. "Er, great then," I stammered. "Thanks." Why. Why do I try to joke with the colo-rectal people? What is wrong with me?

After listening patiently to my hysterical tirade against medical message board Chicken Littles and Star, Dr. Wang instructed me lie on my side, facing away from him. "I'm going to tell you everything I'm doing, so they'll be no surprises," he said. I heard the squirting of KY.

"I'm inserting a small camera into your rectum now," he said soothingly, as though this happens all the time. "I can that there's no internal bleeding. I can see hard stool up there."

"Is it possible to take prints home?" I asked. Why do I do this? But Dr. Wang chuckled. Yay!

"Now I'm going to insert this, so I can see the edge of your rectum," he says. He dangles a metal object shaped like a large crooked index finger in front of me. It looks like a prop from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

"Oh," I say meekly. Moments later, I sense that even if I get really poor, selling my anal virginity on eBay is no longer an option.

"You have hemorrhoids," said Dr. Wang, as I sheepishly adjust my clothes.

"I thought only 60-year-old men got hemorrhoids," I said.

He shakes his head. "Many more women get them than men, actually," he said. "But no one ever wants to talk about it." He says this with a trace of bitterness. Dr. Wang can find no one who wants to talk about their ass with him! How sad he must be.

Apparently, women have a lot more problems with constipation than men, and when you strain to pass a bowel movement, it causes blood vessels in your butt to swell. If you remain constipated, and thusly your shits are hard, it irritates the swelling and the swollen blood vessels tear, which causes the bleeding. It's very common in women in their twenties and thirties, especially those who, like me, take birth control pills.

"No one ever tells you this!" I said. "They should show you a film strip in school! The Second Period."

"I know," Dr. Wang said glumly.

While Dr. Wang talked about how softening the stool with fiber and over-the-counter stool softeners will relieve the hemroids, I tried to maintain eye contact, because it must be hard to be a colorectal surgeon who no one ever wants to make eye contact with. He seemed to appreciate this and opened up a little.

"When I first met my wife, she only had a bowel movement around once a week," he said. "She used to get bloated, to cry out from the pain. And she's little, like you! She's thin. I used to say to her, I can feel the stool when I press on your belly."

This, I think, has to be the most romantic thing any man has said to a woman.

"I started her on fiber supplements," he said proudly, "the drink, not the pills. The pills barely do anything. In a few weeks, she was much better." He pressed a package of Konsyl into my hands and smiled paternally.

Dr. Wang and his wife have been married for eight years, and in all that time she has been hemorrhoid-free. Now, he says, she shits at least every other day.