The Flood

I was semi-hoping that my days of toilet embarrassments were over; alas, I endured the motherload of all awkwardly mortifying moments 2 weeks ago. As you can see, it took me some time to recover enough from The Incident to write about it, so with much trepidation and anxiety, here goes.

So Chris and I are visiting his parents in PA for the weekend, along with his younger sister. Now, I'll just say right here that if I didn't feel comfortable around his family or had just met them, this story would rate a lot higher on the mortified scale. But, you'll see that regardless...it's pretty awful.

Anyway, it was Saturday morning. We've all eaten a delicious filling breakfast, and that very breakfast was on its way through my system and ready to meet its end in the ceramic throne. I headed to the bathroom to do just that. Now, this toilet has a tendency to, shall we say, overflow. Knowing this, I reminded myself to perform a courtesy flush "halfway through". This was successfully performed; I completed my business (trying to keep out the details here, but falling short of rated G), closed the lid, flushed and started the shower. Somewhere between taking off my shirt and stepping over to adjust the temperature of the shower, I noticed I was standing in what felt like a small ocean. Glancing down, I saw that the toilet had, in fact, become a small waterfall. Now, I could have done one of several things here. I could have run into the hallway, shirtless and screaming for help. I could have simply grabbed the towel I had laid out, threw it around myself and run into the hallway screaming for help. But no, my brain insisted that I must first turn off the shower. Then my brain insisted that I locate my t-shirt and put it back on even amid my panic. If you have never attempted to get dressed in a panic, I wouldn't recommend it. Suddenly you become extremely uncoordinated, as if you had regressed to the age of 2 and were attempting to clothe yourself in a snowsuit. Needless to say, my delay was costly. After successfully re-dressing myself, I then ran into the hallway screaming for help. Meanwhile, the toilet waterfall continued to gain in speed and volume like a stream aspiring to become Niagara Falls. Chris responded to my call for help, racing down the hall and immediately went for the shut-off valve behind the toilet. (Now, why didn't I think of that?) Alas, the valve was stuck, and it took a few tries before it was successfully shut off and the flood stopped its momentous rush. At this point Chris opened the toilet lid before I could warn him that there was some solid matter still floating gleefully inside, post-courtesy flush. He gagged in revulsion and scrambled for towels to start mopping up the ocean of poopwater.

The aftermath of The Flood went something like this: 2 inches of water covered the bathroom floor & linen closet, flowed into the hallway and into one of the nearby bedrooms and cascaded like a summer rain through the floorboards and into the basement where Chris' sister was splashed in the eye while attempting to catch the fallout in a large bucket.

But hey, at least I had my shirt on!