Shite or flight?

The diary of a hypochondriac

Still April 2012

Fight, flight or shite?

Apparently a recent study suggested that those horrible little nausea inducing butterflies that flit and glide around our stomach in moments of great stress, fear or trauma or in my case most things are performing a function other than inducing desperation.

They are busy pumping your blood to the extremities of your body to prepare you to run or fight, well at least that is what the men in white coats said to me. Fight or flight hey, well as a man who struggled over 20 years ago to pass his science Gcse’s I do not consider myself qualified to confirm or deny this theory but I have a few, well one of my own.

These brave champions of human science have probably spent decades and millions thoroughly researching this but how? That is what I want to know. Did these men and women of science have to place themselves in ever increasing positions of danger to record these results?

How do they orchestrate the tests?  I have visions of white coated boffins on the plains of the Serengeti wrestling lions and tigers and bears oh my! While other white coated scientists gather around them carefully placing electrodes on parts of the body and studiously recording the results.

“Look, Kevin didn’t seem that scared right up until the Lion ate his arm”

How many of these selfless citizens of science have perished for this study, too many I say. Sacrificed, in the never ending quest to explain the mysteries of the stomach butterfly. But my real concern here is with all this wanton loss of life, why have they yet to discover the third variable in all of this; shite.

Having recently found myself abandoned in Poland, heart cracked into pieces by a cardiologists daughter (yes I am still banging on about it) I spent my last 10 days in the Polish city of Wroclaw being taunted perpetually by the crafty tummy butterflies. Yes there were moments (oh so brief) of fight, some to of flight but the resounding twenty four hour response of my stomach was an overwhelming urge to shite. What the scientists seemed to have failed to grasp is there is a small third category of which I belong to the shiters.

Being a shiter is a major hindrance. It must have been a nightmare for any of my ancestors who suffered this same malady. If you had needed to flight from battle, stumbling over inhospitable terrain as fast as your little armour covered legs could carry you; the last thing you would have needed was the urge to shite. Somewhere in the history books there is a poor Reichhold, crouched by a bush, holding his armour to the side, bottom in the air shitting away as the axe wielding murderous hordes drew ever closer, what an end!

There is really no situation when these dreadful butterflies creep in, that unloading your bowels on the nearest toilet is going to be of help but you are what you are and I am not a fighter, not a flighter, just a shiter.

So come the revolution, Armageddon, or the apocalypse; some will fight, some will flee but if you need to find me I will be availing myself on the nearest lavatory.