There are things that have happened that they don’t teach you about in school— intriguing, wondrous things that happened long ago.
This is something that happened.
Once, all creatures lived beneath the sea. At the top of the food chain were the lobsters. Lobsters were highly intelligent, socially and technologically advanced creatures. Eventually, like most species at the top of the food chain, they realized that life would be simpler if they possessed slaves to labor for them. Humans (at this time no smarter than seaweed) were terrible swimmers with strong upper bodies—this made them excellent slaves.
The lobster’s reign over the seven seas was not uncontested. Shrimp, while physically inferior, possessed a legendary tenacity and were widely revered military strategists.
No one remembers for certain what started the war.
It will never be known whether it was the shrimp’s annoying tendency to hold weeklong parades during minor holidays, or if it was the lobster’s proclivity to eat shrimp larvae.
What is known is this: these two mighty races had fought to a near stalemate when the brilliant shrimp general devised a risky plan.
The shrimp armies freed the humans from their pens, and trained them to eat their crustaceous captors. The humans consumed the lobsters at an alarming rate, until finally, on the verge of extinction, the lobsters swallowed their hubris and went to their former enemies to beg for assistance.
The shifty shrimp, who loved a battle even more than a parade, readily agreed.
The humans stood no chance in the sea against the combined might of these two powerful shellfish. They were forced from the oceans in a matter of weeks, where they were required to evolve in order to survive on land.
There are things that have happened that they don’t teach you about in school.
At first, I had suspected that the discomfort in my lower abdomen was a result of some recent weight gain. I wait tables in a restaurant where most of the entrees we serve are either deep-fried or smothered in copious amounts of cheese. Eating this food five times a week for the past seven months has added an inch or two to my waistline, causing my pants to fit slightly tighter than they used to. The aching feeling in my belly has already been going on for several days by the time I realize that the pain is originating from my belly button, and has nothing at all to do with the way my pants are fitting me.
***
An omphalophobic is a person with a fear of belly buttons. People who have this fear grapple with all kinds of irrational issues involving their navels. Some individuals even have it so bad that their fears extend to other people’s belly buttons as well, in extreme cases it can reach the point where they will avoid going to the beach, or a swimming pool, because the site of an exposed naval makes them so uncomfortable. This is an embarrassing fear, and not one that many people would likely be willing to admit to having, but nevertheless it exists. Personally, I have no issues with anyone else’s navel; in fact I find that a woman’s belly button can be quite sexy. My own however, is a different story.
Despite my previous statement that belly buttons can be attractive, they really are creepy things. Think about it. Have you ever seen an umbilical cord before? They’re wet tubes of flesh that, while we are in the womb, connect our stomachs to those of our mothers and deliver the nutrients needed for us to develop into fully formed human beings. As soon as we are born our umbilical cords are snipped off. Leaving a small section (a stump) of them behind, which withers (rots) and falls off ten to twenty-one days later. What’s left behind is the belly button. Some of us are left with innies: frightening, cavernous lint traps, while others are left with outies: nasty little mounds of knotty flesh. Sometimes there can be complications. I read an account of one unfortunate woman in Southern California who gave birth to a healthy baby girl and took her home. The woman cared for her daughter’s umbilical stump for eight days, wiping it down with alcohol as the doctor had instructed. On the ninth day the woman discovered that the stump had fallen off prematurely. A syrupy substance oozed from her beautiful infant’s wound. It looked like pea soup.
***
I am at work when I realize that there may be reason for genuine concern. I am bending over to clean off a table when a sharp pain shoots through my belly button. It is at this time that my anxiety begins setting in. I’ve always had some neurotic and irrational concerns over my belly button coming undone and my viscera spilling out. I know this is a ridiculous and impossible scenario, but in order for me to be absolutely certain that this is not what’s happening I need to go into the men’s room so that I can use the mirror.
What I see in the mirror certainly explains my discomfort, but doesn’t make any sense: there appears to be a large seed stuck in my belly button. I haven’t eaten any seeds lately. Even if I had, I can’t imagine any situation that would lead to one somehow becoming lodged in my navel, but that doesn’t change what I see. I have never been comfortable putting my fingers into my belly button so I take a couple of deep breaths to try and gain some composure before I begin to use my index finger and thumb to try and dig this mysterious seed out of my navel. My fingers are too thick to fit in my belly button and grab the object, so I try using my pinky to scrape it out of me—to no avail. Now my heart is racing, I am no longer thinking rationally. There is something lodged in my belly button, the one part of my body that I have always been frightened of, and I have no idea what it is or how it could have possibly gotten there. The only thought in my head is that I need to get it out of me. I start trying to flush it out with water—splashing water into my navel and pushing on my lower abdomen—I am screaming silently to myself now, mostly asking incoherent and disjointed one word questions: How? Why? What? The water proves no more effective than my fingers. At this point I am overwhelmed with frustration so I go into the kitchen, grab a couple of toothpicks out of the box on the counter and head back into the bathroom. It does not take long after I begin digging and scraping with the toothpicks that I catch a glimpse of something puzzling. There appear to be several short, thick black hairs in my belly button along with the seed, “is the seed tangled in these hairs?” The thought disgusts me, and is quickly pushed from my mind because the hairs do not actually seem to be holding the seed to me. Were I thinking rationally at that moment perhaps I would have been able to process the truth of what I was looking at, not that it would have done me much good, but at least I would have been able to calm down a bit.
This is when an epiphany hits me. I’m standing in the men’s bathroom, shirtless and digging through my belly button with toothpicks (how dignified), and I realize that whatever is in my belly button is not a seed: it is either a growth of some sort, or something that belongs inside of me that has somehow started to push its way out. Either way, trying to remove this object from my navel with toothpicks was only going to make things worse. I needed to see a doctor, and it was already ten o’clock at night, which meant that the emergency room was my only option.
Before picking me up from work my wife Lola had gone on Web MD and learned that one of the more likely causes of my current state was an umbilical hernia: an outward bulging (protrusion) of the abdominal lining, or part of the abdominal organ(s), through the area of or around the belly button. We’re on our way to the hospital and I am trying to remain as calm and composed as possible despite my omphalophobia.
“It’s a quick operation and then they send you home with a big bottle of Vicodin,” Lola tells me from the driver’s seat.
“How big?” I ask,
“Really big”, she assures me.
The triage nurse is having a bad night despite the relative emptiness of the ER waiting room. Initially the nurse lets me know that the only time she’s ever heard of a situation like mine was “in that Sigourney Weaver movie with the alien.” When I tell the nurse that I think I have an umbilical hernia because of what my wife found on Web MD she begins a tirade that opens with the proclamation that “Web MD is the scourge of ER’s nationwide.” However, once she has finished venting her frustrations, she ultimately confesses that my problem may in fact be the beginning of a hernia, and not an alien. Then, without even asking me to lift up my shirt, the nurse declares that she is sure that I will be fine (she is not at all convincing) and orders me to take a seat in the waiting room.
Two hours later I am stretched out on a hospital bed, wearing a johnny and waiting for the physician to walk in. At this point I have resigned myself to my fate. I just want to get my surgery over with so that I can get whatever’s sticking out of me removed (or pushed back in) so that I can get home with Lola(who is reading patiently in the corner) and my Vicodin and put this whole horrific experience behind me.
After another hour of waiting the doctor pulls back the curtain around my bed and walks in.
“Hello”, says Doctor Wong, a genuinely happy smile on his face, “So you have something coming from your belly button?”
He speaks with a slight accent that I’m guessing is either Japanese or Korean.
“Yeah,” I reply to the doctor’s question, “I think it’s a hernia. Let me show you,” and I lift up the front of my johnny.
“Look like a tick.” The doctor proclaims without hesitation, “You have a dog?”
“No.” I answer, confused by what I have just heard him say. “I have two cats.” I tell the doctor. “What did you say it looks like?”
“It look like a tick. I think you have a big dog tick, I need to get a closer look.”
Doctor Wong then starts poking in my belly button with a piece of a tongue depressor, a satisfied and oddly delighted expression on his face.
“Oh yeah. Definitely a tick, you want to see?” he asks Lola, oblivious to the fact that her skin has gone pale. “Look, you see its legs move?”
Then I remember back to the mirror, where I had noticed those short, thick black hairs.
“I have to find something to get underneath its head with. I’ll be back.” Said Doctor Wong, who then leaves the three of us (Lola, myself and our new parasitic friend) alone in the room while he goes off to forage.
Five minutes later the doctor comes back into the room with a pair of surgical tweezers. He removes them from their sterile packaging; I feel great relief to see that they are fairly dull. Doctor Wong then takes a close look at the tweezers in his hand.
“I got wrong ones. I need to find the very sharp tweezers to get all the way under the head.”
He then exits through the curtain and returns a few minutes later armed with tweezers that look like they can gauge elephant hide.
“Much better.” He says.
“Is this going to hurt?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
I tilt my head back, close my eyes and focus on breathing. I’m attempting to practice basic relaxation techniques and all the while I can feel Doctor Wong digging a huge tick out of my belly button with a pair of needle nose tweezers. It stings, but not a lot.
“Okay, you want to see?” The doctor asks, and drops the tick, now lifeless, into my hand.
“Thank you.” I say exhaustedly and start to sit up.
“Hold on. I have to make sure I get the whole head.”
I lie back down and close my eyes again. This time I can really feel him digging, and pulling with the tweezers. I try not to think about the beautiful baby girl in California whose belly button oozed pea soup. I try not to let my neurotic fear, that the doctor will dig too deeply and rupture something inside of me, get the better of me. I have a quick vision in which the doctor pushes too hard on the tweezers and my guts start spewing out uncontrollably as technicians rush in to try and stop it.
And then he is done. I look down at my belly and see that I am still intact. There’s no pea soup. No bile or intestines are seeping out of my belly button; just the slightest trickle of deep crimson blood.
I've had a long lasting interest in doors. One time, on mushrooms, I spent over an hour with my hand on the door-knob of my bedroom door; convinced that if I were to turn it just right that it would open into another universe. To my disappointment it did not. Perhaps this door opens upon a world of magic, or dinosaurs, or, more likely: magical dinosaurs. I'm almost certain that it does. And that is why it is locked.
