The Best Time I Peed On Myself

by Naomi Skwarna

Diabetes Mellitus was the first disease I made amateur study of. Years before I was born, my brother Danny was diagnosed with juvenile-onset diabetes, and I grew up watching him prick his fingertips with a horrifying device called an Autolet — essentially a spring-loaded thumbtack — a half-dozen times per day. Autolet technology has advanced, but back then, producing a single gleaming drop of blood to be placed on the end of a test strip required incredible fortitude. Nearly everything Danny ate was measured and weighed, and he was measured and weighed, and weights and measurements became extremely important in all regards. Urine was tested for evidence of ketones, which I found gross and exciting.

Because it didn’t touch his blood sugar levels, Diet Pepsi became a thing that my brother and I obsessed over and coveted endlessly. Privately, we called it The Peps. In conversation, we replaced the word insolence with insulin. One time when I was ten, I tried to stick my finger with his Autolet, but got too frightened at the last moment and ran from his room with true fear in my heart.

Bound by the rituals of his disorder, as far as I could tell, Danny neither loathed nor prized this failure of his immune system — he couldn’t recall another way of living. Daily, I watched him puncture and inject, my fascination stretching to school projects, year after year, peaking in grade five. Collecting several used hypodermics from his trash, an empty bottle of insulin, and a handful of fresh cotton balls, I arranged them in a shoebox like a biohazardous horn of plenty.

The scent of rubbing alcohol makes me feel tender, nostalgic.

The summer before I started university, I was still drinking unreasonable amounts of Diet Pepsi — up to six cans per day. I lived in a basement apartment that regularly flooded and never completely dried out before being flooded again. Enormous tropical slugs populated the stairwell, and they squished beneath my soles like revolting fruits. I had so little money that I decided to skip out on phone and Internet, instead using the payphone at the end of my street that smelled like someone’s unhealthy cum.

At that age, mostly I thought that if I was alive, then yeah man, it’s on. I worked my lethargic bookstore job, I let the yogurt in my fridge turn watery, I stood in the supermarket and read US Weekly without pleasure. For “fun” I would starve myself until I couldn’t handle it. Then I would eat something, a bowl of cereal, anything, and feel the sugars flood through me.

The week before classes were to start, my left leg broke out in what I thought were hives. I put some whatever on it, told myself to relax and slammed a few cans of soda. As I did most evenings, I walked to the payphone and called one or two friends who were unlikely to answer and left long, joke-filled messages.

Classes began, and over the next month, the rash advanced into meandering trails up and down both shins, densely pocking my ankles and feet. They itched like satanic bug bites, and I scratched them so much in my sleep that I would wake up with powdery blood caked under my nails. It got worse and worse: sleep was fevered and I spent my waking hours observing the tiny pulse that each hive bore. For reasons of negligence, or fear, or shame, or likely some ineffable cocktail of all three, I didn’t go to a clinic, nor did I seek the counsel of a 2006-era WebMD. I just lived with it, really with it.

As the days got shorter, I’d reach the end of my nightly payphone messages in darkness, the sun having set behind my back. Unnerved by the gumminess of the blue plug that joined the wire to the handset, I’d run home filled with an intense fear of the dark; dread of the way the booth was the only lit thing in view. I ran every time, slipping on slugs as I tore down the stairs to my sodden apartment.

Months passed, and sleep required arranging icepacks over my legs in order to soothe the rash and stop me from scratching myself to ribbons. Demented by an itch that never subsided, I would sleep and wake in starts, moaning and lavishing pity on myself for the torture I had sustained these months. At last, I thought, I knew what it was like to have your life regulated by the self-serving moves of a disease.

One night in December as I was readying myself for finals, I thought or dreamed or hallucinated a cure. In the dream or the thought or the hallucination, I was instructed to take a cup, a clean cup, and carefully pee into the cup. Then I needed to pour the pee down the full length of my leg, from the top of the thigh all the way down to my foot. But the bites aren’t on my thigh, I countered. No matter, pee on the thigh. I groped my way through the dark apartment to the bathroom, retrieving a cup from the kitchen. This is where things get hazy. I remember peeing into the cup and pouring it all the way down my leg, including the thigh. I remember the immense feeling of relief over having finally done the right thing. I don’t remember going back to bed. I do remember waking up a few hours later thinking ha! ha! about a dream that I’d peed on myself. I walked to the bathroom still amused, and was met with the spectre of the cup resting on the corner of the sink, a few drops of liquid ringing the bottom. I knocked the cup into the trash, where it lay on its side, soon to be obscured by eye makeup wipes and clinging tampon wrappers.

That afternoon I went to my university clinic, hyperaware of my leg, which felt unnaturally alive. Around me, other students slumped in vinyl-upholstered chairs the colour of labia. Some coughed, or studied, but mostly, we listed sideways, waiting for our names to be called by a nurse who would add two or three unnecessary syllables to it. Eventually, an exhausted doctor looked at my legs before wheezing that it was the work of parasite called scabies, which sounded like something a Victorian serial killer might have. I was instructed to get a tube of Kwellada-P, which promised to “kill scabies mites and eggs in most cases.” That little caveat would be my downfall, I feared, back in my apartment and slathering myself in the toxic-smelling (because it was toxic) lotion.

Scabies, it turns out, is not especially uncommon, but it is more likely to appear in the immuno-deficient, meaning the body’s own ability to protect itself has been compromised by something, for instance, a virus like HIV, or in my case, a total lack of any self-care. I would’ve been less likely to get scabies had I not been subsisting on a diet of aspartame and French Toast Crunch.

The Kwellada-P killed the parasite after one try. Over the next few months, my scars turned from raw pink, to mauve, to gone altogether. I still worried any time a bug bite appeared on my knee or my foot felt a little scratchy, but I was undeniably no longer infested with microscopic bugs.

This story embarrasses me, years later. When I’ve told people about the… leg, I frame it as a story about being drunk, or having a bad spider bite, or sleep-walking — things that in my mind seem less crazy, or at least crazy but fun. The part that isn’t funny or fun or anything really is how long it took before I understood that the parasite wasn’t the illness. The fact that I had let it fester for as long as I did wasn’t either, but it was a symptom. Without necessarily articulating it as such, I felt that I was being punished with an external scourge that mirrored the way I truly felt. Despite the rambling, “humorous” messages I left for my friends to prove that I WAS TOTALLY COOL, those bleeding lesions seemed more intimately real than anything else about me. I tended and nurtured that mood disorder with repetition and invented logic, and it did the same for me.

I can’t tell if the way I treat my depression now as a sort of shadow partner is particularly healthy, but by understanding that it’s there, I am forced to care for myself even when I don’t want to. I know this isn’t so hard for everyone — eating right, maintaining health of all kinds; talking to people instead of just leaving messages, or the 2014 equivalent of that. But whenever I’m at the drug store and I see the Kwellada-P with it’s equivocating assurance, I think: whatever new game keeps me from pouring a cupful of urine on myself is probably better than none at all.

Naomi Skwarna is a writer and theatre artist, daunted by poetry.