How I Blew Out My Anus By Lifting, Bro

health

May 6

“Do you even lift, bro?” Oh, sure. We’ve all heard that phrase somewhere, sometime, in our lives before, and the implication is always that you are weak because you don’t push, and pull heavy things; and while I certainly agree the human body needs, and yearns for, carrying heavy weight in exercise, we also need to be careful not to hurt ourselves too much in that goal. “Lifting heavy” is not always the answer to a query from a gym Bro.

Ask me. I should know!

Yes, I injured myself by getting too fancy and too hubristic, and the consequences have been three weeks of sitz baths and several trips to the dermatologist to get righted what I wronged!

It all started when I saw a new sort of Kettlebell exercise that involved deep squats. Not just regular squats, but what some may call “Asian Squats” where you go all the way down to the ground where your bum is almost touching the ground. Yeah, just typing that out makes me realize how stupid I was to even attempt the idea! Oh, if we could only go back in time and remediate our immediate emergencies!

Anyway, I decided to put a 40lb. Kettlebell in each hand and do my deep-to-the-floor squats.

I did about 10 of those squats until I “felt” something “down there” that didn’t feel right. I stopped what I was doing. I decided I felt okay, and I continued with my presses and snatches — but no more squatting for the day.

I felt fine the rest of the day.

However, the next day, in the shower, while I was washing all my private parts — and if you are not washing your anus and testicles, and the bottom of your feet every time you shower, you’re not doing it right, you must always gently scrub and check for things that don’t belong or feel out of place — and I was lucky in that as I was washing my delicate bits I felt something really out of place anally and out of the ordinary rectally.

There was a big bump around the rim of my anus. I first thought it was a hemorrhoid, and I tried to just push it back in like we sometimes want to do — but this time was different; this thing didn’t want to go in, and when I pressed it inside anyway, it popped back out! It was then that I realized something else was going on here.

As a luckily married man of 35 years, I asked my beloved wife to take a look at what I’d obviously done wrong, and she said there was a “loopy finger” sticking out around my anal ring. It just so happened to block my evacuation hole, so I knew I needed to somehow get this fixed.

I checked online. Sitz bath with epsom salts for five to seven days would help shrink the problem. I did all that. No change. In fact, it felt like the problem was getting bigger. Not, I learned, was it growing as big as a baseball, or a tennis ball — yes, those sorts of anal hematomas can get that large — but the number one cause of these sorts of injuries, I discovered the hard way, is lifting weight that is too heavy. I was not just guilty of that, but of being completely stupid in my deeeeeep squatting. All of that together, I believe, became the straw that broke the anal ring’s back — because I’d successfully done “regular” Kettlebell squats for years with no ill effect.

I visited my dermatologist to see if he could help. The internet told me there was a 50/50 chance a dermatologist would help. If not, I had to go to a proctologist, and that wait would be three months or longer. I regularly see my dermatologist for skin cancer checkups, so I knew I could ask for help from him faster than I could make an appointment with another doctor.

My dermatologist first tried to drain it. No go. The next week he injected it with something. No change. The third week he told me to go see a proctologist, and I pretty much begged him to just “cut it off” like he said he’d originally do if the injections didn’t work. He reluctantly agreed; and so there was cutting, and blood, and cauterizing, and blood, and so far, I feel better, the problem appears to be gone, and I’m actually considering when I’ll be able to lift a Kettlebell again because, for the past month or so, I’ve only been doing gentle Yoga stretching.

Be careful out there — and especially under there, too!

Kettlebells are heavy! Don’t be cute! Don’t challenge yourself to something you’ve never tried before, and that no other sane person has ever before tried. Your body belongs to you, and that’s why you must not only be your own gatekeeper, you must also exercise kind dominion over the entirety of you, or else you’ll end up pantsless, bloody, and burned on a dermatologist’s examination table begging for the favor of relief.