Hell Week, Part I

Editor's Note: A guest post from one of my shyest readers. Name withheld to protect the indecent.

This story starts with a little golf, ends with making Speaker’s weekend.

Hit up the local track (a hidden gem) for a little twilight all-you-can-play action. Had my buddies in tow as well as a customer/friend to round out the foursome. We quickly decided on the wager, a buck a hole skins (with carryovers) and a cart versus cart best ball challenge.

First hole I grab the trusty 3-iron from the new bag for my only practice swings before teeing off on the dogleg left first. I say out loud, “Ohhh, the swing is feeling good boys. Hope you brought your A-Game!” I then proceed to hit a beautiful draw, following the natural curve of the hole, and after we count it off and find all the balls we see that I’ve out driven the others (who hit drivers) and found myself a short wedge away. 250 yards. Crush.

Thus started both a great round of golf and a week from hell.

39 on the front and I’m feeling good, Lewis. Two birdies, including one that takes 3 skins (plus an extra skin for the birdie) and another that snakes in from 40 feet away. Turns out that in one physical model of the universe, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line…In the opposite direction, Danny.

I lose focus and shoot a 43 on the back, of course finding the groove a little too late to break 80, but not too late to win a slew of skins. Took somewhere in the region of $50 in bets, including the big carryover on the extra holes we played after our 18 was completed.

We left and I did something dumb pertaining to work. Something that happens all the time, and often in a much more “non-compliant” way, but is wrong nonetheless.

(No, I’m not going to say what it was. But needless to say it was not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things and is only “wrong” because the company has a very strict outlook on what we can and can’t do. Many, many people in my position - even in my company - have done this and much more. Doesn’t make it right though.)

Being the great guy that I am, I immediately began feeling bad about it. I even had corrective measures running through my head before I hit the unlock button on the luxury sled that is my Impala. Don’t be jealous.

I call up the fantastic girlfriend to say hello and end up recanting the story, as well as a more enjoyable one in which I broke a little girl’s finger because she somehow pissed me off in Kindergarten. I’m sure she deserved it. I don’t just break fingers for no reason. That being said, prior to spending considerable time on what I could remember about the bitch who probably didn’t listen when I told her to stop pointing at me, I said something to Elizabeth along the lines of, “I did something really dumb tonight. Blah, blah, blah, I could technically get fired for doing it. Blah, blah, blah.”

I figured if somehow it was ever found out I could always just move to New Jersey (where she is located) and let her take care of me until I get back on my feet. Aka - As long as I could milk it. That was the intent of telling her that. A joke. We laughed and moved on to finger breaking.

I’m now home, comfortable in my bed and still talking to Elizabeth. I hear voices but I know I’m home alone. I loved McGyver and I know I’m smarter than MaCauley. So I’m confident I could build some sort of protective rig if it really does turn out that I have intruders. I’m mentally stripping my fan for pieces I can use in a makeshift shiv and wondering how I’m going to make the wheel and pulley that I’ll need, when I realize it’s my other phone making noise.

Seems that it has called someone from bouncing around in my pocket, and now that I had taken it out and set it down with my keys and such I can hear someone’s voicemail system. Mystery solved. Grab the phone, see that it called a fellow employee by accident, and listen long enough to hear the recorded voice going over another thirty or so options for the 5 minute voice mail I just accidentally left before hanging up.

No big deal, right? It’s late, which sucks, but a mistake is a mistake.

Until my head pops off my pillow at 6am and I realize that I may have left a fellow employee a message hanging myself.

Just a few hours earlier the drinks had been plentiful enough to block that thought. But now I was up at an hour only reserved for migrant workers and the elderly, freaking out that I may have given someone the ammunition to fire my ass.

Up early enough to have my roommate ask if I want to play golf with him at 8am, I figure I have nothing else to do and grab my shit.

For the life of me I couldn’t remember the point of my conversation where I mentioned the incident. The only thing I knew was the second phone wouldn’t have made the call until I put it in my pocket on the way up to my apartment from the car. Luckily my girlfriend has crazy recall, and it would be just a matter of time before I could call her and find out when I said it.

So I went golfing and the knot in my stomach wouldn’t go away. The shots weren’t crisp and the scoring was terrible. At 9am I finally called and got Elizabeth on the phone. She confirmed that I couldn’t have hung myself because I said it right away while I was still in the car driving home. I had long since moved on to breaking fingers. Hear that ladies?

I felt better, but couldn’t really shake the rock gut. Played soccer the next day in African (or McCarron International Airport) temperatures. Championship game against a bunch of foreigners, which means yelling and screaming sprinkled with hacking and threats of fighting. Three red cards to douchebags from the other team, along with our 2-0 lead, had all the habibis in the mood for blood. On three separate occasions a player from their team tried to rush the ref. Not to chest bump and yell, but to maim. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was the only guy near the ref during one incident, seeing quite clearly that if the guy broke through the swarm of teammates desperately trying to slow him I was going to have to introduce him to 882 and 799 Newtons of force. (Right fist, left fist) Luckily (for him and my knuckles) he had enough team members thinking clearly and acting swiftly enough to stop him from getting to the referee, a small man who would have gotten the beat down of his life. Unless, of course, he knew any one of the numerous arts that are martial.

So you can probably imagine how beat I was come Sunday night. Roughly 41 holes of golf over 20 hours followed by a draining soccer match under the blazing sun just 24 hours after that. My hunky 31 year old body is no longer built for that kind of punishment. Mentally I was beat as well. Too much time in the sun with the knowledge that I may have fucked myself had left me mushy on the inside.

Only, not as mushy as I would have liked.

On my back in bed, slowly stretching my sore muscles. One arm wrapped back around my head while the other moved up my pained left side to my chest. And then I felt it. A knot.

A knot directly under my left man-tittie.

Now, I can’t honestly say if I’ve always had the thing there or not. I know that it’s possible I could have felt the thing a thousand times and never linked it to anything while my younger, seemingly indestructible self.

I had never actively thought about having a lump under one of my he-boobs before, but I gotta say I was rooting pretty hard for there to be one on the opposite side under ol’ righty.

No such luck.

Fuck.

Breast cancer? Seriously?!?

I immediately grab the porn box and begin my search for some website to tell me that it’s impossible that I have breast cancer, a cancer where males comprise only 1% of the total number of cases.

First site I see says…

Male breast cancer is rare.

Hmm, I’m not liking my chances here. I have shit for luck.

It happens most often to men between the ages of 60 and 70.

Fuck. I knew I was out of shape, but this is getting embarrassing. But promising for the odds.

Exposure to radiation.

Probably not.

Family History.

Nope. Things are looking up!

High Estrogen levels.

Is that why I recently purchased that Fabio poster? Fuck, I hope I don’t have high Estrogen levels. That would be the ultimate kick in the nuts. I’d probably have to get my penis turned inside out into a vagina at that point. Maybe find some chicks to scissor.

(I’m not going to lie though, I’d have a fantastic looking vagina. Well, as fantastic as an inside out penis would look shoved into a gaping wound in my body could look. People would probably be like, “You know, I wouldn’t have thought you could pull off an inside out, junk created vagina. But I was wrong. YOU GO GIRL!” Or something similar. My junk is impressive. In a cruel twist of irony, the only vagina large enough for my Multiple Times Confirmed Huge Junk would be my own vagina, created from the very penis I could never find the right size vagina for.)

So at this point I’m thinking that, despite my tendencies towards Hypochondriac Royalty, I just don’t fall within the possible boundaries of male breast cancer. I mean, sure I could be seeing some declining testosterone levels with all the drinking I do at 31 years of age, but I’d be seeing some other issues like loss of libido or erection problems. That’s just not happening. Jean Claude is as pumped for work as he’s always been.

But there is the unexplained issue of this freaking lump. Hmm, lets check out information on the lump associated with male breast cancer from another site to put my mind at ease…

Often painless, usually located directly under the nipple.

FUUUUUUUUCK!!!

So now I truly believe that I’m going to have breast cancer, the manliest of all male cancers. I obsess over my dude melon all night, constantly checking it to see if it’s getting worse or better. I’m like that kid you always had in class that wouldn’t stop sniffing during tests. Every few seconds I’m now groping myself on autopilot, not even aware that I’m still doing it. My hopes are for it to go away by the time I wake up, as if it’s some sort of goofy muscle tweak.

Now I wake up in the morning to my buddy the breast lump and his new friend, pain. That’s what I get for playing with it all night. And oh yeah, one of the other symptoms is pain.

I’m now officially tit deep in hell week.

To Be Continued…