Don’t It Make My Brown Eye Blue

Admit it.  You check out your poop before you flush.  We all do.  Maybe it’s a genetically programmed reflex, as the state of your poop indicates a lot about your general health and quality of your diet.  This is probably why we’re so startled when we see something out of the ordinary staring back at us from the depths of the toilet bowl or our child’s diaper.  I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill deviations in texture, girth or volume.  I’m talking about color.  If anything other than a shade of familiar brown exits the building, most of us get a little freaked out.  After polling some friends and Twitter followers, I’ve discovered that many of us have had similar “surprises.” 

Flush This Book is an attempt to illuminate the lowest common denominator of the human experience, and to get us to laugh about it.  But when you find yourself shitting various colors of the rainbow, you’re probably more likely to call the doctor than call a friend who appreciates toilet humor.  If you pass light yellow or black tarry stools, call a doctor.  For everything else, you most likely ingested food coloring that added some pazazz to your everyday turd.  

Blue and purple dyes that lend their hue to grape and blueberry flavored drinks, icing, slushies and yogurts turn neon green for their encore.  I’m talking nuclear waste, grab-a-pair-of-sunglasses bright green.  Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops produce poop worthy of an Easter basket.  Red dyes and beets go in red and go out red.  I had a friend who, twenty-four hours after downing a generous slice of red velvet cake in the break room, drove himself to the ER because he thought he was dying.  After paying a hefty deductible and undergoing his first game of invasive grab-ass, the doctor further mortified him by asking if he had possibly eaten anything with red food coloring over the past two days.  The good news is that he spared the rest of his colleagues from unnecessary hospital visits and butt-probes, as everyone who had eaten the red velvet cake had subjected their spouses to a round of, “Honey, can you come look at this for a minute.”  So no.  Those are not blood clots in the toilet; just blood-red butt nuggets that might make you look like you’ve seen a ghost for a second. 

Which brings us to the subject of ghost-white turds.  Gastro-intestinal discomfort can require a patient to drink a barium milkshake for that diagnostic x-ray.  Just in case the doc doesn’t warn you, that next friendly turd you pass isn’t Casper.  Just looks a lot like him. 

There are lots of natural causes for poop to run the gamut of the entire spectrum.  Carrots will stain a baby’s bottom orange.  Blueberries will actually arrive in clumps that look dangerously similar to the original serving.  Leafy greens and corn make an exit that looks a lot like their debut. 

The next time you take a gander in the bowl and are greeted with a palette worthy of Crayola, calmly review what you’ve ingested over the past forty-eight hours and enjoy the rainbow.