I just got over a mean case of food poisoning. It was so awful. Thank you for your attempts to sympathize, but I don’t deserve it. I did it to myself. I poisoned myself. Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine. Maybe I deserve your sympathy, because unlike the Neanderthal man I have all these food preservation techniques and appliances at my disposal, I just choose not to use them. Does that idiocy does warrant some sympathy, maybe.   

Who, other than a complete moron, accidentally poisons themselves three times? You do it once, and it’s because you’re living by yourself for the first time in your life. You’re a bachelor, and you’ll learn, right? Twice is happenstance. It’s a circumstantial accident that can happen to anyone, but three times? That man just refuses to learn. Check that, I learned one thing. I learned that there are levels of food poisoning. There’s the ‘Ooh, I don’t feel so good,’ uncomfortable stomach ache that leads to limited activity for a night. It’s the ‘I’m not calling in sick for work today, but I don’t think I’ll be playing softball tonight’ type of food poisoning. Then, there’s the ‘I don’t want to go out, speak to anyone, or do anything other than just sit here and watch TV, and maybe listen to some soft, soothing music before I sleep this off’ food poisoning. The third level, the one I was introduced to the other day, is a ‘not only do I think this could take me, but I’m not really sure if I want to go on’ level of food poisoning. Seriously, I consider myself something of a survivor now. Someone said I should’ve gone to the hospital, and do you want to hear how dumb I am? That thought never even crossed my mind. That’s right, if you read my name in some obituary, you’ll probably shake your head and say, ‘It was only a matter of time. The man just didn’t know how to take care of himself.’

I also sprained my ankle last week. It was a bad, high ankle sprain that happened while I was walking my dog. Pathetic right? Oh, and I almost forgot, I’ve been diagnosed with stage four liver cancer, and I have four years to live. I’m lying, I don’t have stage four liver cancer, but Geoffrey Guardina does. Do you want to know how I know that, because he told me. He gave me this earth-shattering revelation about sixty seconds after our hello. 

“Hi, I’m Geoffrey Guardina,” he said, “and I have stage four liver cancer.” All right, I’m exaggerating a little. He said some things in between, but the minute he dropped that bomb, I forgot everything else he said.

Geoffrey and I were trying to have a casual, adult conversation, and then he goes and says something like that to bring the proceedings to a crashing halt. I couldn’t, and I’m a pretty decent conversationalist. I wouldn’t call myself gifted, but I’m pretty adaptable. I challenge any gifted conversationalist to pivot into the trivial and mundane topics that adults talk about when meeting a person for the first time after they say something like that? No, Geoffrey has the floor after that info dump.

I wanted to say, ‘Geoffrey, Geoffrey, hold on, before you go into the excruciating details of your terminal diagnosis, remember, I just met you, and I’m not done calculating how the mistakes you’ve made with your diet can have on me, and I just learned your name one minute and twelve seconds ago. We might want to hold off on the excruciating details of your impending death until, whaddya say, the three-minute mark? I don’t know if there’s a protocol for dropping a terminal diagnosis, but I think I should, at least, have your first name committed to memory. Because when you say something like that, I’ll not only forget your name, but I might be so shocked that I neglect to say I’m sorry to hear that.    

That’s right, I forgot to say, I’m sorry to hear that. I could see it all over Geoffrey’s face. The look said, ‘I just told this man I have stage four liver cancer, and this guy hasn’t said I’m sorry to hear that yet? What is wrong with him?’ Geoffrey’s face had total condemnation all over it. ‘It’s social protocol for him to say that, yet he refuses,’ his face said.   

Geoffrey paused to allow me a spot to say it, and I forgot. I admit it, but I just met this guy, and he introduces himself, and I’m all wrapped up in observing him and trying to figure him out a little. I’m not devouring his characteristics, because he’s not that engaging, but I’m always curious about what makes my fellow man tick, and then he tells me he has stage four liver cancer. Stage four, yeah, he just found out, and he just found out he likely won’t see his son graduate from high school. Maybe you’re quicker than me, but with that shock and awe whirlwind, but I think I should be forgiven for my failure to fulfill my end of the cultural obligations of social protocol. 

“They’ve given me four years to live,” he added. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. I got it in.

Now, I know what you’re thinking right here. I can feel it on some of your faces. Four years for stage four? Was Geoffrey lying to me, or did his doctors lie to him? I don’t know. That’s what Geoffrey told me, and I wasn’t about to say, Geoffrey, Geoffrey, you might want to check again with your doctor, because I’ve never heard of doctors giving stage four liver cancer patients four years. I think you might have six months Geoffrey, tops. If you’re one of those fact checkers who fact checks everyone on every stupid, little thing, including their mortality, then you’re either a better man than me, or much, much worse.  

Whatever the case was, we weren’t two minutes past his terminal diagnosis, and Geoffrey starts giving me intimate details about his divorce. “Yeah, she was cheating on me,” he said, “with one of my best friends.” 

It wobbled me. I couldn’t think of anything to say, but I caught myself, and I said it. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Geoffrey.” I added his name to further punctuate the seriousness of my sympathy to hopefully erase any remnants of my initial transgression. I should’ve added a big old Good God man! Good God Geoffrey, we just finished an awkward intro that I still haven’t quite recovered from, and now you’re telling me your best friend slept with your wife? Nothing you say to me from now until the end of time is going to top that buddy. 

I felt bad, I still feel bad, for Geoffrey. Don’t we all, but I think my tank of sympathy and empathy done dried out years ago. I’ll continue to live up to my obligation of saying, “I’m so sorry to hear that,” but you guys done dried me out with all your divulging. You divulge, confess, and reveal the most intimate, embarrassing and uncomfortable details of your life to me, a person you’ve just met. You do it on all of your social media sites, and we click, like and emoji, until we’re just done caring about you. 

My dad’s generation opened up a bit more to their immediate family, but they kept the embarrassing stuff close to the vest, for the most part. Alcohol was the asterisk, and they drank … a lot. They drank so much that it was a part of their personality. When my dad’s generation drank, they opened up and told every Tom, Dick and Harry who sat next to them at their favorite watering hole, anything and everything they could think up. My grandpa didn’t say anything to anyone, even his immediate family, but my grandpa didn’t drink. He would’ve been floored by what we tell the person sitting next to us in the office.

Our generation, sober and drunk, walk up to complete strangers and tells them about their problems at work, their inability to perform sexually, and their genital warts, because why not? If we can’t handle it, it’s kind of on us, or that seems to be the way they see it. Have you ever seen those guys who get competitive? They drop the ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ and then they say something along the lines of:

“You think you got it bad, Geoffrey Guardina? Huh, I say you have no idea how bad it can get. The other day, I was walking across a bridge, and the largest, most aggressive eagle you ever saw picked me up, flew me to her nest, and tried to feed me to her babies. And if I didn’t keep a can of pepper spray on me, which I do at all times, I hasten to think what would have transpired. Moral of the story, always carry a can of pepper spray. Stage four, liver cancer? Pffft! I’ll rock your gawdamed world Geoffrey Guardina!”  

We call this the war story effect. Everyone has to have it worse than their neighbors, and no one is embarrassed by it. “What? It’s the truth man, and if you can’t handle the truth that says more about you than me.”

If you’re dumb enough to walk up to people and ask, “Hey Geoffrey, how you doing?” They’ll tell you. EVERYTHING.

And they’ll preface it with, “You might want to sit down for this.” I don’t know who invented that phrase, but we all need to get together to stop using it. Have you ever heard of the economic principle of supply and demand? If we all agree to limit the supply, it might have a corresponding effect on its demand. Why do we do it, why do we say this phrase so often, because we want to give our story a dramatic intro, but before we say it, we need to make sure our story has a pay off first. I’d have to check my logs, but I’ve never said, “Good God, Thomas, why didn’t you tell me to sit down before you said that. You had to know that I’d lose all consciousness after hearing it. It’s your job as the storyteller to warn me, have me sit down, or something. You just can’t do that to people.” 

I’ve finally figured out why people suggest that you might want to sit down for this. It’s not about blowing us out of the water with their plight in life. It’s that it’s going to take them so long to tell us what’s wrong with them that if we’re not sitting, we run the risk of our knees locking up and falling to the ground. “You ask what’s wrong with me,” the Geoffreys of the world ask. “A better question might be, what’s right?” 

“There are some people with whom we can, and should talk about our ailments. Like our doctor, for example, our family physician. The ear, nose and throat doctors are paid to listen to our every complaint. Imagine being Geoffrey’s doctor. “All right, Geoffrey, I understand you have the worst ailment since the Bubonic Plague swept Europe, but if you were to chart your pain on a 1-10 pain scale, what would it be?” A fifteen. Of course. How many of us chart a fifteen for our family physician? How many of us now know about the ‘off the chart to fifteen’ people, so we drop a seventeen on our doctors? That’s right, I’m a seventeen. “Listen, you don’t know pain, until you’ve felt an eagle’s talons go an inch and a half into your shoulders.” That may be, Geoffrey, but we have this pain scale for a reason. We’ve carefully tailored it to be between one and ten, so we know what we’re dealing with, and if we don’t abide by a pain scale of limited standards, it’ll go away. You don’t want that do you Geoffrey? Right, so what’s your actual number?

“Well, doc, I’m not sure if your western medicine pain scales cover the level of pain I’m experiencing here.” 

“My bet is most ear, nose and throat doctors just threw the whole notion of charting and scaling out decades ago, because most of us, myself included, have no perspective. We off-the-chart pain everything from food poisoning to sprained ankles as a fifteen on the pain scale, because we  have no perspective.

You disagree? You think your level fifteen pain is worse than anything mere mortals can ever comprehend? Have you ever heard the term necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia? Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia was the diagnosis my wife’s friend’s father-in-law received after his doctor had a biopsy performed on a sample of what Huey once considered an uncomfortable irritation.

“Doc, I got this itch in an embarrassing location that just won’t stop.” 

“Well, let’s take a look Huey … huh, interesting. We’ll have to put this through a variety of tests, but I’m pretty sure that what we have here is a case of necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia.”  

“A what?” 

“Yeah, I read about it in a medical journal a couple years ago,” the doctor says, studying Huey’s area far too long, “and I never thought I’d see one myself.”  

“That’s great doc. Now, on another note, I’m not sure, but I think … yeah, I just lost all feeling in my left arm.” 

Imagine sitting on the family physician’s examination table. Huey probably thought he had a really mean case of jock itch for months, and it kept getting worse. He and his wife tried all sorts of talcum powders, anti-itch creams and balms. They tried every over-the-counter remedy the corporations have to offer, and nothing helped. He was probably in the doctor’s office to get some kind of prescription strength ointment for what his friends and family thought was a nasty fungal infection that defied over-the-counter medicines, and this doctor drops the medical equivalent of Hiroshima on him. I don’t know about you, but that might be one of the first pieces of information that I might need to sit down before hearing. 

Just hearing necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, lets those of us who think we’re fifteens on the pain scale know we have no idea what true pain is. I had a mean case of food poisoning, and last year I had a bout with the flu a year ago that topped out at 105-degrees, and … what was that term again? Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia. Ok, well, I feel completely ridiculous now for ever complaining about anything in life now. If you’re anything like me, and you hear the term, you cringe. Just hearing the term, before knowing any of the details, we cringe so long that our old wives will tell tales of our faces getting stuck that way. We’ll walk around the office for a week with that look on our face, mumbling necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia in the halls.  

“What is necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, anyway, Bob?” 

“I don’t know. Huey told me, and I sort of blacked out before he could get into the details of it.” We make that face just imagining what it could be. And it turns out, it’s one of those rare conditions that is actually worse than we can imagine. 

It’s a flesh-eating bacterial disease. How do you actually make a flesh-eating bacterial disease sound scarier? You give it a name that combines the scariest words you can find from the Greece and the Latin lexicons. They took the Greek term nekros, which means corpse or dead, and they combined it with fasciitis from the Latin language, which means a band, bandage or swathe. So, you now have what modern medical science terms a swathe of death on your genitalia, but those in charge of medical science terminology decided English words like swath and death weren’t dramatic enough, so they dug through the origin of words to come up with the scariest sounding disease they could find. It’s so scary sounding that it’s almost funny. It’s “holy crap!” funny. You can’t just hear it once either. 

Hey, Bob, what was the name of Huey’s disease again?” you ask Bob at a party, “because these guys think I’m making it up.” Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia. You might think some marketing team in Hollywood thought it up to sell their slasher flick. My guess is that that team of medical professionals who made it up, never had to deliver that diagnosis to patients, because the terms swath of death and flesh-eating bacterial disease have comedic and horrific appeal, but necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia is box office.

We love our big words. They make us sound and feel large and meaningful. We also love Latin or Latin terms, like necrotizing fasciitis that make our ailment sound like an apparition that escaped an Egyptian pyramid when they opened it up for the first time in thousands of years. 

Have you ever heard people do this? “I just went to the doctor’s office, and she told me I have a mean case of singultus?”

Singultus, we say repeating it with her, as she slowly pronounces it for us, ohmigod! Judy! I don’t even know what that is, but I feel so bad for you. Just know that you’ll be in our prayers. Judy, you later find out, has a mean case of the hiccups. Damn it Judy, you had me really worried. I had another friend, named Teresa, who told me she has tremors. Tremors, Teresa? Holy crud. I understand how tremors from tectonic plates can cause earthquakes, but how does it occur in the human body? It’s the shakes. Teresa had a case of the shakes. If your doctor tells you that you might want to sit down, before telling you that you have a mean case of nasopharyngitis, viral rhinitis, rhinopharyngitis, or acute coryza, wait for the explanation before you run screaming down the hall, because they’ll conclude that presentation by telling you that you have the common cold.

Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia is one of the few names for a conditions that sounds so horrific that the more compassionate in the medical profession chose to go in the opposite direction of giving conditions big, big scary Latin-Greek sounding names. They collectively decided they should call it Fournier’s gangrene. Why did they do that? My guess is they changed the name hoping to limit the number of casualties they saw from men bolting out of the doctor’s office to go jump off the nearest bridge. ‘You have necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, but the good thing is, Stan, that this can be treated. We caught it so quickly that we have a long line of antibiotics we can test to … Stan! STAN!! … Golblast it. Nurse, we lost another one. Remind me, next time, that we need another term for this.’   

The term doesn’t quite capture the horror of the details, in my opinion. Necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia involves a slow growth of the bacteria on the penis, until it eventually rots off, and it turns out … wait for it … it turns out that it’s quite painful. What? Yeah, when I heard Huey’s story this element of the story was slowly spooled out to me. I have to imagine that piece of information was slowly spooled out to Huey too. “Wait a second, doc, you mean to tell me that the process of my penis slowly rotting off will involve pain?” Yes, it turns out when the bacterial disease reaches a stage where the penis starts rotting off, it will prove painful. “Well, dadgumit!”  

The Center for Disease Control also lists necrotizing fasciitis as a rare bacterial infection that spreads quickly in the body, and it can cause death. Death? Yes, it can cause death if not treated. Does anyone else think that when the doctor hit Huey with that fatalistic message, Huey regarded that as relatively trivial and anticlimactic information? It can cause DEATH! “I heard you doc, but can we get back to the slow, extremely painful rotting of the penis, until it falls off. How long does that process take? How painful is it? And how much time do I have to get my affairs in order before I go off myself? My daughter and wife mean the world to me. Prior to today, I thought I’d do anything and everything in the world for them. I also love my little beagle Max. He’s my fella, but I’m not sure I love any of them so much that I’m going to try to survive as long as I can for them. I don’t think if I have it in me.

Hey, I’m not a suicide guy. I’ve known people who have taken their own lives, and I know firsthand, the pain and misery it can cause friends and family, so I don’t mean to make light of it. I don’t think suicide is the answer, or the solution to anything we encounter, but if I’m ever in a doctor’s office, and that doctor drops necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia on me, I might be weighing options that I’ve never considered before.  

“The key to treating this deadly bacterial infection is treatment,” our doctor tells us, after he uses smelling salts to revive us. “We must act quickly with various anti-biotics. A hospital stay might be necessary, and it might end up being a lengthy stay, as we chart your reactions to various treatments, and I do need you to consider one other possibility, somewhere down the line, after we’ve exhausted all other possibilities, that there might be a need, as a last resort, for some, some surgery.” The doctor says, “I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to hear that, but it might be a necessary option that we might need to consider some surgery to stop this fast-spreading bacterial infection.” 

The doctor does this slow, dramatic build to the word surgery, as if that’s the scariest word that he’s dropped in his office that day.

“All right doc, well, do you have time for this surgery, this afternoon?” Huey probably asked. “I think I can move some stuff around and be ready in … whaddya say, twenty minutes? No, well check your logs and tell me what time your surgeon is available. I’ll be in the lobby …There’s no way you can arrange it that quickly? Ok, well, is there a way I can do this myself? I know you strongly advise against it, and I appreciate the idea that you cannot approve of it in anyway, but there have to be some YouTube videos out there on this procedure.”  

So, the next time a Geoffrey Guardina, a Teresa or a Judy, steps up on you with their level fifteen pain from the hiccups, their tremors, their stage four, liver cancer diagnosis, their mean case of Ebola, or whatever the hell it is that they think is going to get some sympathy out of you, say those five words, necrotizing fasciitis of the genitalia, and drop the mic down in that puddle of flesh that just dropped off them, because of their mean case of Ebola.”