I present to you the latest job opening from my nursing agency:

It is a study at Suchandsuch Hospital, dealing with stool. The study volunteers would collect their own stool and the nurse would then grade the stool and monitor the patients for dehydration. There will be an orientation date the week before, to be announced.

You must be able to start IV’s and be willing to work with Stool.

Pay is $42/hr for all shifts.

Okay, so two things that had me ROTFLMAO about this announcement. One, that stool is capitalized. And two, that nurses can get paid $42 an hour to look at poop and assign a grade to it. The sad thing is that ever since I became a nurse, I am pretty much obsessed with stool. In nursing school, they tell you that this will happen and everyone says, “No way am I going to be obsessed with poo poo!”

But then one day it happens. You find yourself staring down into the toilet bowl thinking, “Hmmm. Think I need to increase my fluid intake.” Then your husband says he doesn’t feel so good after the mexican food he ate. “Have you pooped yet?” You ask. “What did it look like?” That’s when you know you are a real nurse.

The consolation here is that nurses aren’t alone in using stool as a key indicator of health. If you’ve ever seen Dr. Oz on Oprah, you’d know that he often advocates the use of stool as a diagnostic tool. In the segment “Everybody Poops,” he even goes so far as to analyze the sound that it makes as it drops into the toilet:

“You want to hear what the stool, the poop, sounds like when it hits the water. If it sounds like a bombardier, you know, ‘plop, plop, plop,’ that’s not right because it means you’re constipated. It means the food is too hard by the time it comes out. It should hit the water like a diver from Acapulco hits the water [swoosh].”

Dr. Oz, you are my kinda MD.