I stare at the big orange jug with reproach. The humiliating waxed drinking cups they provide to decant pee from your body into the jug.

I delay for a week. I see my family doctor. I ask her if re-doing the test is really necessary. She tells me to re-do it. I leave in a huff.

I stare at the jug for two more days.

I get an email on Thursday that both of my job sites are shut down on Friday due to delays. Office day. I guess that means that I can do THE JUG.

I do the jug. I carry it to work, obscure it in a dry bag in the fridge. Nonchalantly retrieve the bag from the fridge before going to the bathroom.

I carry the cold sloshing beast home from work. It's Friday night. I pour myself a tall soda with lemon. I'm cooking a fancy dinner, sipping my soda. I have two or three glasses of the cool, tart soda.

We sit on the patio after dinner, and only then do I realize what I've done.

Oh my god. I'm so stupid. I drank way too much fluid tonight.

I pee before bed. The jug is brimming.

I wake in the middle of the night and pee into a mason jar.

In the morning, I fill the remainder of the 1L jar to the brim.

FUCK.

I go for a run at dawn to shake the anxiety and humiliation from my body.

At 11am, I walk towards the lab with the orange jug and second mason jar in my bag, slung heavily across my shoulder. It sloshes around unnervingly.

Suddenly and without warning, I hear a strange popping noise concurrently with the weight disappearing from my shoulder. At the same moment I feel something splash across my bare calves.

I stare down. My bag is full of broken glass, and my pee is streaming down the sidewalk. I look around to see who is watching. I kind of poke at my bag, assessing the damage, realizing that IT WAS ALL A WASTE and that I carried the goddamned orange jug around with me for 24hr for NOTHING.

I pick up my bag by two dry corners and shift the contents around a bit so that I can transport this heap of glass and pee home.

I walk home, steam coming straight out from my ears like a cartoon, dribbling a little trail of pee behind me.

I'm so angry right now.

I'll laugh about this tomorrow, but right now I'm so friggin' tired of all of this nonsense and tests and doctors and a part of me wants to just give up and accept that my body is no longer willing to ovulate and that's that.