Halt. Whoo Goes There; Friend or Enema.

We had a young man who was brought to the emergency room with complaints of abdominal pains. He was about ten years old. Questioning the boy and his family, we found that he hadn’t moved his bowels in nearly a week. After the physician examined him and did abdominal x-rays, the doctor made the diagnosis of a fecal impaction and ordered enemas until clear.

The young man was anything but cooperative and not at all enthusiastic about the whole affair. When we explained it to him what we were going to do, but he was dead set against it. He wanted no part of it, no way, no how.

We moved him into a small room with a restroom attached. We thought that when he had to expel the enema; we could walk him quickly to the commode to save the mess. It didn’t quite work out that way. He was a holy terror. Two of us had to hold him down, while the third nurse gave him the enema.

 

While William and I held him down, Ellen slowly emptied part of the enema inside the boy. He began to squirm and fuss. When it was almost all in, we felt the boy stiffen and then yell. We felt him bear down and the geyser of colored water barely missed hitting Eileen. It didn’t miss the wall, but splattered and ran in dirty streams down the wall.

Ellen took the young man to the restroom while William and I cleaned the worst of the mess from the wall, the floor, and the bed. When Ellen returned, she said, “Only colored water. We need another enema.”

William and I helped, actually it was more like forced, the boy back onto the bed. Ellen came in with another enema and we repeated the process. The enema would slowly disappear inside of him. He would grunt, yell, and then the water would explode as the fluid was forced back out. Then Bill and I would clean and Ellen would repeat the process. He did occasionally vary his routine squeezing it back out in small spurting, streams while he was still getting the enema. The water would shoot back out in all directions. We were fortunate that no one was splattered in the process.

Finally, after about six enemas, success, we hit pay dirt and it wasn’t highly colored water that hit the wall.

Long after the boy left with his parents, we were still cleaning the room. We had thankfully removed everything that was portable from the room before we had started. Housekeeping was summoned to finish wiping off the walls and the floor and housekeeping wasn’t happy about the enemas either.