I felt the old familiar pangs of chronic stomach problems on the bus this morning. Luckily, our bus was rerouted due to a shooting downtown and the ride lasted twice as long. And thank god I was one of the many standing unfortunates gripping enormous bags of stuff, hanging onto the bar until my arm started to feel the warning tingles of inadequate circulation.

Otherwise, I might have been able to sit down and curl around my churning stomach, cinch tight my buttocks, and pray that I didn’t finally get to experience anal leakage.

So as we were driving AWAY from our destination on a round-about detour, I recognized that the sort of discomfort coming from my protesting digestive system was its version of a fair warning before it flushed my system of the offending toxin.

I will admit, I have something of a *ahem* delicate constitution. Just glancing sidelong at a bowl of warm potato salad in the sun will give me a rumbly in my tumbly. I am the only person I know who can contract food-borne illnesses through osmosis. So my entire life has been built around keeping myself as stress, gore, and rotten-food free as possible. But sometimes things slip past my goalie. My team will never make the championship.

I tried to hunch over, but the gravity of my enormous bags and the physics of needing to hang on to the bar to keep from assaulting my fellow passengers kept me from succeeding.

My tummy gave another warning twist, and my brain reacted by covering my body with a clammy sweat. Take that!

The bus driver, god love him, was doing his best to keep his place by lurching forward five feet at a time, inching along with all the other irate commuters in the world’s longest conga line.

My traveling companions were deep in conversation about something that I couldn’t have given a flying fuck about, due to the fact that I was weighing out the worst-case scenarios.

I might have to get out at the next stop, or maybe just scream that I need to get off here and now, crawl to the sidewalk, take off my shoes, and just shit right there in front of that antique store. They don’t open until 10am, nobody on the bus would have to know, and I wouldn’t stain my shoes. Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

Luckily, once we turned to get on the bridge, our speed increased to 15 miles an hour, and my stress level dropped a notch. I squeezed my eyes shut and repeated my mantra: If you have to crap your pants in public, it won’t kill you. I was referring to myself in the second person, so it was working already.

The second someone gave up their seat, I flung myself in it and felt a bit more in control. We did loops around downtown, attempting to get back on our route. All the damn one-way streets mocking me!

My companions were adjusting their belongings, still conversing cheerfully, talking about the large coffee beverages they were going to purchase. Ugh! The acidity! My stomach protested the mere idea of that black swill, normally so welcome in my daily routine, by traveling up into the back of my throat.

That did it. I reached for the bell, stamped to the door, and snapped something at my friends. My brain was in survival mode and became hostile to anything or anyone keeping me from my economy sized bottle of Pepto Bismal stashed in my locker.

I took it in my arms like a lost child and sat in the break room, snuggled around it, drinking freely. As the red-hot forks loose in my belly morphed into cool spoons, rubber balls, and finally, sugar lumps dissolving, I apologized to my friends and told them to be thankful that they hadn’t had to witness me crapping on the sidewalk while holding my shoes in my teeth.