I received my yearly post card from Dr. Squint. It was time for my colonoscopy. Now you younger guys are on the five-year plan but alas mine comes once a year. When I get to be Charlie and Don’s age, I can expect one once a week. Anyway, I was reminded of my first trip in 1981 at the age of 30 to a colo-rectal surgeon.
First of all, don’t go to this type of doctor. The key word is surgeon. They don’t get paid unless they cut. He had been a breast reconstuctionist but rationalized that only half the population was benefiting by his skills. Go to a gastroenterologist or GI doc. But I didn’t know any better. After he showed me his line of colostomy bags and wipes he asked me to kneel on what looked like a church pew while wearing a hospital gown.
There is really no dignity in one of these things to start with and when I found out that one size fits all, I was dismayed at being a full figured boy. So there I was on the kneeler when it began to move. I was rotating upward and over until my backside was pointing straight up and any effort to keep that gown in place was futile.
The next thing I know they took a shoe tree and greased it up good, and inserted the darn thing and opened it up. Now there is a reason I don’t say W O W any more. The next step was to hang a cage with a canary inside like they do in coalmines. Next old doc Squint asks if a surgical resident, Dr. Rhys – Jeffries sits in. So I was thinking of some austere Brit and said “no” through tightly pursed lips.
The next voice I heard was what sounded like an 8th grade girl remarking about the advanced stages of my disease process. After that appearing at the beach without a shirt didn’t seem so embarrassing after all. So Squint told me that I had to have my first colonoscopy. I was familiar with the sigmoid scope, which is like a riding crop with a steel umbrella tip. But a colonoscopy was different.
Squint then showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go in various directions, at one point passing through Hartford. I wasn’t paying much attention after he told me he was sticking a 21 foot hose up my backside. Of course in a very gentle and reassuring way. I nodded thoughtfully but I wasn’t listening as my brain was screaming “You are sticking WHAT, WHERE?
I left Squint’s office with a prescription for a product called Go-Litely which comes in a plastic 1 gallon bleach bottle. Now, I think that waterboarding may be torture but not compared to this process. We should employ this stuff at Gitmo, now.
The day before my test, I began the PREP. I didn’t eat any solid foods or red Jello. You can’t eat red Jello because it looks like blood in the intestines. I ate sodium free chicken broth, which is tasteless. Then that afternoon I prepared a gallon of Go-Litely, by adding water to the bottle. Every 10 minutes I had a yummy 8 ounce glass of what tasted like the original Gatorade – lime green salty phlegm. It smelled like the big urinal mints.
Go-Litely chained me to the porcelain for the better part of the night. The side panel on the jug revealed that a loose, foul smelling, watery BM would result, leaving an oily residue. The instructions were an understatement surpassed only moderately by parachute instructions advising that you will hit the ground at 130 mph should your shoot not open. After 4 glasses of Go-Litely your bowels are evacuating food that you will not eat until next week.
Sue took me to Squints clinic the next morning, what was left of me. Now I was thinking about what happens if the Go – Litely isn’t all gone. How can I go back and see this man again. Would a fruit basket be enough?
At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.
Then a nurse named Ronnie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Ronnie was very good, and I was already lying down. When everything was ready, Ronnie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Squint was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I didn’t see a 21 foot hose but I knew it was there someplace. I was seriously nervous at this point. Squint had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. I would have told you in explicit detail what it was like but I don’t know. Really. I slept through it. One minute Squint was singing “At the Copa….” And the next I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.
Squint asked me how I felt and I told him I felt great. Not at all like sharing a cell with that guy from Slingblade. Even better, my colon was clean as a whistle all except for a little piece of brown tissue they had found. After the pathologist reviewed it, they confirmed it was a little piece of corned beef left over from dinner on Tuesday.