Colonoscopy
Carnival
One of the
delightful rites of passage visited upon us at the age of fifty is the
colonoscopy. Now I don't know if any of you readers have already been lucky
enough to have participated in this event, but it you haven’t, it’s not to be
missed! And not just for health reasons either, this experience will create
indelible memories enough to last you a lifetime. And best of all, the actual colonoscopy
is only one part of a two day affair. Day one, the preparation for the
procedure, presents its own extraordinary brand of fun—kind of like watching
fireworks, only when you’re the
fireworks. While in contrast, the colonoscopy proper is merely like re-living
the nightmare I had at camp about an errant snake slithering into my sleeping
bag and “nesting” in my “tunnel” which it mistook for its den. So in the spirit
of full and frank disclosure let me say that a colonoscopy prep equals
shitting your brains out for hours until every last piece of colonic matter
that ever resided anywhere inside you has spurted forth like some kind of
primeval mudslide. And that for round two you get to let a stranger video your
insides with a tiny camera that enters you through an orifice reserved mostly
for outbound traffic as opposed to inbound. Sounds irresistible, right?
*****************
It’s the day
before my procedure. As advised by a friend, I have purchased moisturized anal
wipes. She warned of a rawness that
can develop around the exit area as a
result of the trillions of gallons of excrement that will be spewing from my
behind. She also suggested covering my entire bathroom—floor to ceiling—with
four ply plastic, but I thought that might be a bit excessive. I was never so wrong.
I’m standing in
the bathroom reading the alarmingly precise day
before protocols for exactly how and when I should drink the gelatinous, cherry
flavored, butt exploding elixir. With only a modicum of concern, I gag down the
potion at the specified intervals, and in Alice-like fashion wonder what might
happen next. I sit on my bed and wait and wait and wait. I flick on the TV to Ellen and think, “What's all the hubbub,
bub?" When like the tease before a sneeze, I feel a tiny tingle in my abdomen;
hear some staccato grumblings in my intestines, and KABOOM! I fly into the
bathroom and am non-stop hanging onto the edge of the toilet seat trying to
keep myself from lifting off like Sputnik. A torrent of lava-like magma releases
from my body. My insides are coming out like fire from a dragon’s snout. Taking
a moment to wipe off any of the eruption from my skin is totally out of the
question because I am terrified I might blow one of my hands off if it gets anywhere
near my detonating derriere. I unload in the bathroom for what seems like days
while my frightened husband paces back and forth in the hallway. Tentatively he
cracks opens the door and whispers,
“Are you all
right?"
My face resembles
the inside of a pomegranate, and my feet are braced against the wall in front
of me as another surge of jet propelled liquid blasts out my behind. A small
string of spittle dribbles out the corner of my mouth as I look over at my
husband.
“Save yourself, close
the door and run! If you stay any longer you’ll risk getting hit by splash back!”
He makes the sign
of the cross, and heads for higher ground.
And then comes day
two! In some ways day two is better than day one because there is nothing, and
I mean nothing left in the inner sanctum of your bowels. My emptiness allows me
to drift in a deranged kind of euphoria. Like a helium balloon, I float above
the ravages of yesterday, almost grateful for the desolation—a form of
proctological Stockholm Syndrome.
As required, my
husband drives me to the hospital for my date with destiny. In the gastroenterology
unit we are greeted by Marvin. He is long and lean, dressed in lavender scrubs,
and smells like a bleached orange. He has me say good-bye to my husband, makes him
promise to come back to pick me, and then leads me into the pre-op area. The light
is muted and most everything is pink. Innocently Marvin lays out a paisley
print johnny on the hospital bed, tells me to take everything off and adds,
“Ties open to the back.” I comply, climb under the sheets, and await my mega-probing.
After a few
minutes Marvin returns. He sits next to me in a plush chair and calmly goes over the procedure. Half of me is listening, and half of me is floating near
the ceiling. He has me sign thousands of pieces of paper giving the hospital,
among other things, the right to my first born child. And then comes the IV, the
magic moment I’d been waiting for—the needle, tube and plastic pouch of bliss,
the amnesia drug all my friends had been telling me about. After the life-altering
evening I suffered through last night, the only thing that stopped me from
killing myself was the candy like knowledge that the next day I was going to
get some really good, perfectly legal drugs. Because honestly, there was no way
I would clear-mindedly walk into a sterile room, half naked, and let a complete
stranger snake some device up my bum without imbibing some really good
narcotics first.
Unfortunately for
you readers, much of what happened after the drugs kicked in is a blur. However,
what altered snippets there are, I will gladly share. I remember being wheeled
into a room and told to lie on my left side. I remember a doctor who looked an
awful lot like Omar Sharif appear in the procedure room. I remember the way his
salt and pepper chest-hair protruded from the neckline of his scrubs, and how amazed
I was that I could find anything sexy at that moment in time. I remember a
slight breeze on my right butt cheek as Dr. Zhivago moved my johnny out of the
way. The only other thing I remember after that was looking up at the light
fixture in the ceiling and telling Marvin it was moving all around like a
curling stone. “Yay,” he said, “A lot of people tell me that.”
And then it was
over. I was wheeled back to the recovery room and told I could leave when I passed
gas. Fart to your hearts’ content, Marvin counseled, fart and you can go home. So
as the anesthesia began to wear off, my wind began to break—a popcorn machine
at the colonoscopy carnival. It was oddly liberating to be encouraged to fart.
I wanted to stay there forever. But then the anesthesia wore all the way off and
I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
When my husband
returned to drive me home I readily left the soft pops of the others in the
recovery room behind me. I had a clean bill of health, and a ten year get-out-of-jail-free
card. Though I still felt a bit dazed, I had enough presence of mind to hope
that an apt consolation prize for my recent indignities would be that a decade
from now Omar might still be practicing at my hospital, and my drug induced Lara
could once again gaze upon her beloved poet Yuri.
