Mark Leyner - Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini

There is some danger associated with igniting flatulence. Fraternity guys don’t seem to care.

There is nothing like a long soak in a bath to relax your soul. The problem is that you have to deal with the ghastly sight of your hands and feet after exiting. The simple answer for why this occurs is that our outer layer of skin (the epidermis) absorbs a little bit of water when we soak too long in the tub. Voilá! Old lady flesh!

The skin on the feet and hands is thicker than the skin on the rest of the body and therefore makes any changes more noticeable. As the epidermis expands, the layer below it, the dermis, does not swell, so the epidermis buckles in areas. Lovely, right?

There is no specific course in medical school to deal with all the secretions that you find yourself faced with as a doctor. It is definitely a rude awakening to find yourself being coughed on, spit on, and even urinated on. All doctors have been doused in a variety of bodily fluids.

One wonderful evening in the ER, I heard a nurse screaming. I found her desperately trying to keep a drunk patient who had passed out from hitting the floor. He was not a small man, and the dead weight was too much to manage. The only way I could get him back on the stretcher was to grab him from behind and throw myself on the stretcher with the patient on top of me. Simple. I could then just roll him over. I unfortunately didn’t plan on him using me as a bedpan the instant we hit the bed.

This is disgusting, of course, but when faced with the option of being urinated on or spat on, I would choose urine. No, this is not a fetish. Normal urine is sterile. It contains fluids, salts, and waste products, but it is free of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. It is not always fragrant, but is certainly cleaner than spit. Spit contains large amounts of bacteria and thus is filthy.

It is unbelievable how much information there is available about farts. Flatulence is the subject of numerous medical studies, books, and CDs. One company even makes a fart filter and underpants designed to absorb odor. But among all this gaseous information it always comes back to the bean, the most famous farting food.

Beans contain high percentages of sugars (oligosaccharides) that our bodies are unable to digest. When these sugars make it to our intestines, bacteria go to work and start producing large amounts of gas. We also form gas from other sources, including the air we swallow, gas that seeps into our intestines from the bloodstream, and carbon dioxide formed from saliva reacting with stomach acid.

There is some help available for those who can’t handle their beans. A product called Beano is readily available. Beano contains a food enzyme extracted from mold, one alpha-galactosidase, that helps to break down the complex sugars in gassy foods. Another method is to soak beans before you cook them, as this cuts down on their gas-producing power if you then discard the water. Unfortunately, you also lose some water-soluble vitamins by doing this.

Other flatugenic foods are broccoli, brussels sprouts, cooked cabbage, raw apples, radishes, onions, cucumbers, melons, coffee, peanuts, eggs, oranges, tomatoes, strawberries, milk, and raisins.

Notice the abundance of vegetables on the fart-producing list. That is why those vegetarians are always passing wind in yoga class as they contort themselves into weird positions.

There is a psychiatric illness called coprophagia, the eating of one’s own feces. It is an uncommonly reported symptom that can be seen in patients with schizophrenia, alcoholism, dementia, depression, Kluver-Bucy syndrome (ask Mark), and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Scatolia, the smearing of feces, is often seen in psychiatric hospitals. High-functioning individuals may sometimes exhibit coprophagia as part of a paraphilia or abnormal sexual arousal disorder. There are even some claims that Eva Braun urinated and defecated on Adolf Hitler. Sexy!

You can get very sick by eating feces. It shouldn’t be fatal, but complications from snacking on shit include hepatitis, oral infection, abscess, and a variety of other infectious diseases. Besides that, think of the morning breath.

12:05P.M.

Leyner:Be right there…

Gberg:OK, I gotta run to the bathroom.

12:15P.M.

Gberg:I have returned.

Leyner:Did you wipe standing up?

Leyner:Some people do, I’ve heard…

Gberg:Stop mocking me. You know I am sensitive about being a stander.

Leyner:I’m sorry… you know sometimes I pee sitting down… out of pure laziness.

Gberg:That is what they should teach you in school.

Gberg:Bathroom etiquette.

Leyner:They should teach boys that they don’t HAVE to stand up… that it’s an option.

12:20P.M.

Leyner:When my niece was a little girl she said a great thing once on the way back from a little skiing excursion in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Gberg:And… what were these words of wisdom?

Leyner:It was quiet in the car and all of a sudden she piped up, “I didn’t fart… but I’d open a window if I were you.”

Gberg:With all the new technology, they should make an automatic sensor that senses the gas and opens the window.

Leyner:I hate going into a bathroom in a fancy restaurant where they have an attendant in there.

Leyner:A men’s room seems to be the one place on earth where Emersonian self-reliance should be the rule.

Gberg:I know, I don’t really need assistance getting the paper towel out of the dispenser.

Leyner:There’s really nothing that goes on in a men’s room that I can’t handle myself.

Gberg:You end up feeling so guilty that you have to give the poor bastard a tip.

12:25P.M.

Leyner:You know that expression for waiters and cooks — when they spend their day off at the place they work?

Leyner:Bellman’s holiday or something?

Gberg:??

Leyner:Wonder if there’s an equivalent for men’s room attendants?

Leyner:Look that expression up online, will you… bellman’s holiday.

Gberg:They probably can’t urinate or defecate at home because it reminds them of work.

Leyner:What about the people who check stool samples all day, like at that place Jetti Katz, you know that lab?

Gberg:What the hell are you talking about?

Leyner:There’s a lab I went to once when my cousin, my gastroenterologist, thought I might have picked up some exotic parasite in Tierra del Fuego.

Gberg:Jetti Katz sounds like a performer in the Catskills.

12:30P.M.

Leyner:So he sent me to this lab that specializes in analyzing stool for parasite eggs… Jetti Katz or Jeddi Cats or something like that… some place in upper Manhattan.

Gberg:The Jeddi Cats sound like a band.

Gberg:I love their music.

Leyner:Anyway… they have these women who work there, and what they do all day is handle hot, steaming fresh stool samples. The whole experience is indelible in my brain.