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My dad was dead and I was at a literary reading in Manhattan, pressed into a crowd, trying to move out of the way so a guy could take a flash photo of someone hotter. I was still adjusting to the city, only there to coordinate a funeral and purchase a headstone—neither of which was putting me in contact with people my own age. For that, I would need the downtown scene.
If I were a hardier person, capable of surviving on poor sleep and junk food, bouncing back after benders, and tolerating the insertion of foreign objects into my body without the subsequent need for antibiotics, I would have been enjoying my time in New York. But I had spent my twenties mastering other methods of self-harm: mismanaging finances, dating mean people, moving internationally every few months, and neglecting my dying relatives. I was an outsider, and as a result I moved through the New York scene with an ease born of ignorance. I was rarely intimidated, and apt to join conversations without anticipating the consequences. That night, the conversation concerned alternative medicine, to which I contributed the story of my DIY fecal transplant, performed years earlier in a British boardinghouse with the help of my then-fiancé. The story landed well, and I felt I had gained a foothold in the scene. I left satisfied, and was in bed by 11.
A few days later, I received a formal solicitation to write an article about my fecal transplant. I had long dreamed of writing such an article, envisioning it as a detailed examination of my medical, romantic, and familial histories, the personal threads interwoven with more universal ones such as healthcare, holistic healing, and societal attitudes toward poop. Sadly, the formal constraints of the proposed article were significant: it would need to be under a thousand words, and impart useful scientific information to would-be transplanters. This was a challenge; teaching did not come naturally to me. My first book was a drawing guide, and pressure of speaking publicly and authoritatively about art incited a monthlong panic episode that destroyed my ability to sleep, leading me to glue black construction paper over all my windows, then send an email to my publisher offering to pay the advance back. The poop article would, of course, be less demanding than the drawing book, but it still made me anxious. I put off writing it until the day of the deadline, then I wrote quickly, shamelessly, with minimal editing, convinced that few would read it and fewer would care—which is the only way I can tell the truth.
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The magazine was delivered to my sister's house, where I'd been living since my dad's death. Thankfully, I was at home when the mailman came. I intercepted the magazine, the cover of which showed a disembodied butt, back arched for ultimate flexion, cheeks demolishing a miniature neighborhood, little plastic houses collapsing beneath its fleshy weight. Included with the magazine was a sticker that read: SOBER IS NOT CLEAN, DRUGS ARE NOT DIRTY, a sentiment that frightened me.
I flipped through the magazine, growing more frightened by the page. Certain words and phrases stuck out: nitrous, baddie, vampire dyke, extra autistic. There were nipples too, lots of nipples, their respective gender never entirely clear. This was not my world. And yet I had become part of it. Would I have published here had I ever read the magazine? Would I have been able to publish anywhere else?
When I finally found the article, I noticed that the editors had selected a photo of me that I did not even remember sending. It took up more than half the page and showed me stretched out on the floor, my chin resting on the lid of a blender containing a brown slurry—my fiancé's still-warm shit, mixed with saline solution. I was smiling. I was not wearing pants.
SHIT HIT THE FAN: HOW I PERFORMED A DIY FECAL TRANSPLANT ON MYSELF
By August Lamm
It was 2020 and I was engaged to a guy I'd just met on the internet. I was living in England, where I'd somehow acquired an artist visa. I wasn't making art. I was reading and crying a lot. My fiancé was doing something real, training to be a pilot. We moved into this sad, strange-smelling boarding house near the airfield. I was bored and car-less. The relationship was obviously doomed, but I had no one else to hang out with. And on top of it all, I was sick.
I had always been a frail kid, but in my early 20s my body made it official. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and a degenerative spinal condition. Some combination of the diseases and the treatments made it impossible to shit. I would go days without a shit. My record was two weeks. I tried all the usual tricks: eating fiber and drinking coffee and staying hydrated and going jogging and trying to "destress" or whatever. None of it helped. Sometimes, if I stuck a finger really far up my vagina, I could feel through my vaginal wall the hard tip of a poo. It was just hanging out there, no exit strategy, no sense of urgency. It was getting comfortable, settling in for the long haul. I could empathize: I was similarly stuck. I kept producing more shit even though I wasn't excreting anything. Eating hurt because the food had nowhere to go. When I pressed on my stomach, I could feel the fossilized rods inside me. I worried they wouldn't be flexible enough to traverse the intestinal bends on the way to my anus. I worried they were here to stay.
I was losing hope. I was reading internet advice. I was trialing the autoimmune paleo diet, which forbade: dairy, eggs, grains (oats, rice, wheat), legumes (beans, lentils, peanut butter), nightshades (tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes), and so on. I was living off avocados and coconut yogurt and tapioca pearls. I wasn't shitting. Then, while researching my new diet, I found a documentary about fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), a procedure that entailed inserting healthy gut bacteria (poop) into an unhealthy gut (me). The documentary followed a rare hospital-facilitated FMT. Like most natural remedies that produce no profit for the pharmaceutical industry, FMT is looked down on by the American medical establishment. The girl featured in the documentary was suffering from an intractable gut ailment, the only solution to which was her brother's feces. The brother provided a "sample," which was then inserted into the girl's colon. She was cured. There were all these shots of doctors and beds and gowns and equipment, which I thought was a bit silly considering how simple the procedure actually was: poop goes in butt. I'd had anal sex before. If I could handle a dick, then I could handle a little rubber tube. Reddit agreed with me. Reddit thought it was no big deal and I could totally pull it off on my own. Reddit thought everyone should be doing this. Reddit did warn me, however, to be very selective with my donor. A good match was essential.
My fiancé and I were not a good match in the romantic sense, but he did have healthy shits. He was 25 years old and everything in his body worked exactly as advertised. He could run a half marathon at the drop of a hat, no problem. He slept well each night and took a big dump each morning. I started fantasizing about his dumps—not in a sexual way, just in an envious, acquisitive way. The dumps represented my potential to lead a pain-free, empty-boweled life. I wanted to see one of them in the flesh. One morning, my fiancé opened the bathroom door and called me in. There it was: a perfectly brown log, hot off the presses, soft but solid, the length of my forearm. The log was poking its head up out of the water, like a sea lion at the zoo. I imagined it sliding out onto the floor. I pictured the empty space left in my fiancé's body. I gathered the courage to ask if he would be my donor. He said yes.
My fiancé wasn't particularly curious about the operation. He agreed to drive me to the homeware store, where I purchased a funnel, a squeeze bottle, and a blender. The next day, he shat into a glass pitcher. I poured in some saline solution then blended it all into a slurry. I had my fiancé photograph the whole process. I was worried no one would believe me. (My best friend's reply: "Y'all have officially found the line I couldn't cross myself. But happy for you."). I used the funnel to pour the mixture into the squeeze thing, then I got in the bathtub and squirted it up my butt. I repeated the process a few times to be sure I was pumped full of good flora. Then I lay on the bedroom floor with my butt elevated on a stack of pillows. I was worried the shit would leak out. I shouldn't have worried: my body was a pro at containment.
My own FMT story was anticlimactic: hours later, I excreted my fiancé's donation into the toilet. Weeks later, still constipated, I broke off the engagement. Years later, I started shitting regularly: all it took was gaining some weight. In doing research for this piece, I learned that the tide has recently shifted on FMT. The medical establishment now embraces it as an effective treatment for bacterial infections and irritable bowel syndrome, two historically incurable conditions. Which leads me to ask whether my FMT might indeed have had a positive effect on my gut health—an effect I missed at the time because there were so many other factors impacting my well-being: the engagement, the move from New York to small-town England, the spinal pain, the autoimmune disease. In less chaotic circumstances, might I have noticed a difference? Might I now count myself amongst the saved?
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