The Road To Med School Is Long And Paved With Butts

All day long I look at butts.

No, really. On an average weekday, I see roughly 10 butts. Some days I see many more butts, some days I see far less butts. Occasionally, there are days during which I see no butts at all. On Fridays I never see any butts: we don’t see patients on Fridays.

My boss calls himself an Interventional Pain Management Specialist. But my co-workers and I all know the sordid truth: he is, in fact, a Butt Doctor.

So that’s what we assist him with all day long, Monday through Thursday, in a steady flow of appointments from 9 am to 3 pm: injections either near or in the butt. Sacroiliac Joint Injection, Lumbar Facet Radiofrequency Ablation, Pyriformis Injection, Lumbosacral Selective Nerve Root Block, Hip Joint Injection: if it’s even remotely close to the butt, we’ll stick a needle in it.

The butt, it turns out, is home to some truly fundamental elements of the human anatomy. The lumbar spine is essentially the beginning of the butt. When you’re in the lumbar spine, you’re almost at the butt; you can see the butt, you feel like you’re right next to the center of all the action, but you’re not quite there. It’s like Long Island.

Don’t get me wrong, the lumbar spine is quite the powerhouse. Those five chunky vertebrae take all sorts of mechanical punishment from the rest of the spine: weight-bearing, flexion, extension, rotation, you name it. For the most part, you’ll never hear a peep from your lumbar spine; but with time, and a little wear and tear, this formidable pillar of your skeletal system can begin to deteriorate. The facet joints become arthritic, causing some severe localized low back pain. The discs cushioning the vertebrae squeeze out of place, like a slice of slippery ham sliding out from under a leaf of lettuce covered in mayo.

All of a sudden the nerves running down your legs become pinched at their roots, and it’s bad, man. Now there’s sharp, burning pain shooting down your thighs, and your toes are all tingly and numb, and the previously yoked muscles in your calves start to atrophy, and you’re not responding to the Neurontin, and you can’t sleep because of the spasms, and your girlfriend thinks the two of you need time apart to think about the relationship because clearly things aren’t the way they used to be, and your feet are like

Dude

What the actual fuck

We’re not even near the butt.

But that’s butt pain for you. It moves in silence and violence.

And that wasn’t even the real butt: The Sacrum, in fact, is the genuine item. It may look like a nasty, rusty shovel that’s been sitting in your grandpa’s garage for too long and now it has a bunch of holes in it, but in reality it’s anchoring the whole operation. It is, quite simply, the Butt. It supports your all-important lumbar spine, articulates with the ilium, and eventually connects to your hips and legs. Think about that for a second: you need the sacrum to do pelvic thrusts. Take it away, and your exhaustive James Brown discography becomes 100% obsolete.

And of course, that whole area is home to a fanfare of grisly pathologies. The sacroiliac joint gets inflamed, the cartilage in your hip joint deteriorates, your sacral nerves become impinged, and now you’re experiencing a whole new dimension of butt pain you were not previously equipped to conceive of as being part of the human condition.

That’s where we come in. Here at our Interventional Pain Management Clinic we have the cure for even the most debilitating butt pain, and the almighty Butt Doctor is committed to finding the therapy that is right for You.

First, we’ll ask you about your butt, probably touch it a little bit, and maybe even ask you what other doctors have already told you about your butt. After that, we’ll all get together and have a little chat about your butt: hopefully, we’ll be able to figure out which specific butt part is causing all this damn trouble, and figure out what on earth we’re going to do to fix it.

Once the Butt Doctor has made his decision, I swoop into action. I’ll take you to our procedure room, very politely ask you to undo both your belt and your top button and lie down on the table with your head on the pillow watch your head thank you, and pull down your pants so I can take a good hard look at your butt. After a splash of disinfectant, your butt is Ready to Go.

The doctor comes in, and we bombard that butt with a whole bunch of X-rays, which allows us to see all the way through your butt.

Woah.

The rest is pretty predictable: needle is placed, medication goes in, needle comes out, bandages go on. You are now the proud owner of a Slightly Healthier Butt. Go home and tell all your friends.

Seriously though, that’s what’s so wonderful about working for the Butt Doctor: every day I help people feel better, and for the most part they are extremely grateful. But the best part, really, is that we save all sorts of butts: big butts, little butts, white butts, black butts, none of it matters. We treat even the smelliest, swampiest butt there is. Which reminds me: I’ve treated some butts that smell really, surprisingly nice, and honestly I’m not sure which is weirder.

So yeah, being a Butt Doctor is pretty great. Will I ever have what it takes to become one? Maybe, maybe not. I’ll probably become a kind of doctor that hardly ever looks at any butts at all. I might forget that the human butt even exists.

But let me tell you what I’ll never forget.

I’ll never forget what it’s like to look at someone’s butt and say

I fixed that butt.

smonfront, 24, is a real life Medical Assistant at a Pain Management clinic. He is not a sex offender.