'Round about Christmas (I never promised you a linear chronology), we were at TH's native place, as my friends in Mumbai would say. It's Up North. The time it takes a northerner to tell you they're from Up North is approximately the same as it takes a vegan to self-identify. But I digress.
The first time TH took me there, he slowed down on a residential street of forlorn ticky-tack rowhouses dominated by some cartoonishly sinister cooling towers looming over them like giant concrete mushrooms, and I thought he was being unusually sensitive to my fascination with dystopian vistas and was pausing so that I could get a picture. He wasn't. It was the street he grew up on.
TH's family home is really small. Smaller than our current rental accommodations. Small enough that we literally could not both open our suitcases at the same time in the room that we were sharing. And this house, home to TH's father -- to me, a culturally unfathomable and distant but very dignified man I have met just a handful of times -- only has one bathroom.
I don't really get it when people talk about having "a shy bladder." What's so offensive about a wee? I've peed in communal "trough" toilets in China, and, while it's not my favorite excretory anthropological adventure (that would be my first encounter with a Japanese toilet), it didn't leave lasting trauma. No, what I have is a shy sphincter.
So it was that by the morning of the fourth day, the day we were leaving, TH was trying not to laugh watching me politely decline high-fiber cereal and take the tiniest sips of coffee that would suffice to keep caffeine withdrawal at bay. Four hours later, down some motorways in remarkably poor, bouncy repair, I barricaded myself in our bathroom. I won't, of course, go into details, but I believe the best metaphor would be childbirth.
Taking a post-flush peek (UK toilets can be underpowered, and one likes to be polite), something caught my eye. Something that should never catch one's eye under these circumstances: motion.
In the bowl was a very pink, very thin worm. It was about the length of a pencil, and -- and this is an exceptionally vivid image seared into my brain that I'm afraid will never lessen in intensity -- it was thrashing around with angry vigor by contracting its whole length and springing out, as if attempting a frog paddle.
I ran out of the bathroom and collapsed against the wall, breaking out in a cold sweat. A few minutes later, I crept back in and took another quick look -- surely some kind of post-partum hallucination, right? Nope. I fled again. Then I took a deep breath and went and found TH.
I sat him down and asked whether he was capable of dissociating the part of himself that is a trained medical professional from the part that is a husband. I asked whether he was willing to do something that might permanently endanger our sex life. When I finally gave him the specifics -- he was getting visibly worried -- he laughed and went into the bathroom. I heard a flush, and he ran out, looking stricken.
"Why did you flush?" I wailed. "That was evidence. We should have...I don't know, captured it somehow, or something."
"I panicked," he admitted, "but we need to get you to a doctor anyway." We then went downstairs and pored over his medical books together, which mostly entailed his reading the books and occasionally asking me "do you think it looked like that one?" and showing me a picture I could only look at through partially-covered eyes. I had two main questions: (1) Am I going to die? and (2) How do we get these out of me?
Of course, this happened on a Saturday, and, having determined that I probably wasn't going to die, I spent a long day and a half sure I could feel worms doing that energetic frog-paddle throughout my gut and chewing through my vital organs. I was utterly terrified to use the loo.
TH placed the call for me on Monday morning, as I couldn't deal with having my first experience with a foreign medical system being my telling a dubious receptionist that I had worms. Fifteen minutes later, a very friendly and jolly-sounding woman with an accent that even I could tell was posh phoned me back. I related the story I'd spent the morning rehearsing -- light on the details leading up to the discovery -- and explained about my background living in places like Thailand and India. Could I have had worms for more than a decade, I wanted to know. She admitted that she wasn't an expert in tropical medicine, but didn't think I'd have been symptom-free for all that time.
"Did it look like an earthworm?" she asked.
"Not really," I said. "Too thin and active."
"Are you sure?" she asked.
"Having lived in Mumbai, I'm a bit au fait with worms," I reassured her. I can't tell you what took place during the next five minutes of conversation, because I spent the entire time silently but viciously berating myself for actually having said "a bit au fait with worms." I think it was maybe caused by her accent?
"Can I tell you a funny story?" she asked.
"Oh god, please do," I said.
"When I was a medical student and living in grotty student housing, we had earthworms that would get into the pipes and end up in the toilet. The first time it happened, we completely freaked out and actually fished it out and sent it to the lab. Which confirmed that it was an earthworm. Do you think that something like that could have happened?"
I didn't think so. TH has lived in this house for two years and never seen a worm in the toilet. The toilet in question is on the first (that is, American second) floor, so that's a lot of pipe to travel against gravity. And that was definitely not an earthworm (I am, after all, au fait with worms).
Fast-forward a bit: she gave me the name of a medication with a broad anti-nematode spectrum that isn't even prescription (really, TH, you couldn't have found that out in your medical books and spared me this conversation?) and said it was a pretty benign pill and I might as well take it, to be certain. She asked me a bit, with genuine apparent curiosity, about America and the Foreign Service. We commiserated a little on the indignity of my current situation. "Welcome to Bristol!" she said brightly.
I took the pills. Although I desperately wanted the worms out of me, I also very much wanted to not be aware of, or, if at all possible, present for, their departure. (Every time I closed my eyes, I envisaged something resembling an upended can of Spaghetti-O's.) This not being possible, I just screwed my courage to the, er, sticking place, and hoped for the best. I was not, as it turned out, aware of any mass egress (though I did not examine the evidence closely. Or, in fact, at all).
I did not experience any ill effects from the pills, but neither did I notice any miraculous improvements in digestive health (always a bit dodgy, to be honest) from my de-worming. Because I'm now on the NHS, the entire cost -- not emotional, obviously, but financial -- of all of this was the price of the pills, £6. It's true, I was unable to so much as look at boiled pasta for weeks. It's also true that the entirety of my English medical records now consists of the details of that phone call (and I would almost be disappointed if the sentence "patient is, by her own insistence, au fait with worms" weren't in there), and I am going to have to deal with the horror and enormity of that at some point during an inevitable second and probably face-to-face appointment sometime in the future (hopefully not before we move, thus reducing the chances of it being this doctor, jolly though she was).
No, the biggest lasting negative effect to all this is epistemological, the mystery that haunts us both to this day:
Either a worm that does not in any way resemble an English earthworm crawled up two stories of sewer pipe and chose to manifest itself during my most extreme constipation event in recent memory and despite no lumbricine evidence ever, anywhere in this house, in the two years prior or two months since -- a hell of a coincidence.
Or I have harbored worms (or just a worm?) since probably my last tropical posting ended, in 2007, with no apparent symptoms.
Each of these is equally and extraordinarily unlikely.
One of them must be true.
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