Colonoscopy

Getting a colonoscopy wasn’t as bad as I had heard. It wasn’t as good as I had heard either, because I had heard both. I was told to expect to sit on the toilet all day the day before while the preparation meds did their jobs. It turned out I could have gone about my regular business (which is anything but regular) until about 5 pm when things started moving. I was looking forward to a pleasant empty feeling afterward. Years ago I was living with a friend I’ll call Matt (everyone else does), and we exercised and drank fresh vegetable juice every day. One day I heard nature's call and while sitting on the toilet I started to suspect that nature would not shut up. This was by far the largest amount of matter to leave my body in my life, and probably any body in anybody's life except for maybe a woman giving birth. To twins. The feeling when I was done was euphoric but I had to check the toilet to make sure that there where no vital organs left behind. That last sentence is true. I was truly afraid of what I might find. Happily, nothing out of the ordinary except, you know, a lot of number two. But in preparing for the colonoscopy there was no euphoria; there was no pleasant feeing of emptiness. In the morning when I showed up for the procedure I was, in fact, concerned that the doctor might not find the environment up to his ideal of spotlessness. For years that passageway has been for the illumination of stuff, some pretty foul stuff at that. It seemed reasonable to suspect that a mere twenty-four hours of not eating could clean something that has, to the best of my knowledge, never been cleaned.

Soon I was getting my blood-pressure checked and an IV put in. First a nurse put in the IV but waited until the doctor told me the risks before letting the drugs flow. The main risk was making a hole in the wall of my large intestine. “That would require surgery. Ready?” Then, in what seemed like seconds, I remember opening my eyes and seeing what looked like a throat on a TV screen. A squeaky clean throat too, by the way. I closed my eyes again and when I opened them, Jenny was coming into the recovery room where I had somehow been transferred. Then the doc entered to tell me the results. It all seemed to happen in quick succession. 

The drugs are what people have told me were the good part. To me they were good in that they made me sleep and not feel anything as a snake like camera entered my body through the back door. But, and maybe this is my own fault for not having a sorted drug life in my past, I did not feel anything special. Not even drowsiness. It was, drug, sleep, awake. Ok. I guess I was sleepy because I did go home and sleep for much of the day.