A picture is worth a thousand words
The whole two yards
Count ’em, sixty biopsies.
Many, I suppose most, of you have not yet reached 50. Katie Courec has made it well known that everyone should get one of these at 50 for early detection of colon cancer. Good idea. But of course the very thought of a six foot long black rubber tube inserted in our asses scares the crap out of almost everyone except rache. Lucky me, because of crohn’s disease, I get to have one every two years. Let me assure you, my children, when your time comes, it’s not nearly as bad as you would imagine. They give you great drugs and depending on the skill of the driver, it’s barely noticable. For some reason, I didn’t have my regular guy today, and I was a little tender, there was some discomfort, but not as bad as, say having a cavity filled. I mean a cavity in a tooth.
Having said that, I’ll tell you the really shitty part is the twenty four hours preceding. First you can’t eat. Even at my age I have a metabolism similar to a chickadee. I get hungry. I’d be one of the first to go in a famine. Then that evening you have to take three eight ounce glasses of the clear, chilled, nonalcoholic beverage of your choice mixed with a tablespoon of a laxative that is only rivalled in foul taste by effectiveness. Do not, I repeat, do not plan to be more than 25 feet from a bathroom at any time. Repeat in the morning. So you show up for the procedure in a weakened state with a very clean bowel.
Tip: After several of these, I’ve found that tonic water is the best thing for masking the taste of the laxative. This is important, the thing that fills me with dread as I approach my appointment is not the black rubber hose, but the salty motor oil taste of Fleet Phospho-soda. Last time I puked before I could choke down the last dose.
A final note: They found a couple of polyps today. Never had one before. One was just a tiny lump, but the other one looked like a potato (oh, yeah, you get to watch the whole thing on TV, like Journey to the Center of Your Bowel) hanging down from the top. They told me that they were inflammatory, not cancerous, but the hypochondriac in me says, “Doctors Lie!”
1. regarding long hoses, they say once you go black, etc. is this true in your experience, bob-o?
2. my dad just had a colonoscopy, and said it really wasn’t bad at all, that he slept through the whole thing, except for the rather mortifying disrobal/positionment.
3. i had to drink the phosphosoda before my tubal (twice, actually; once for the original surgery date, once for the ACTUAL date…) and i was in misery – less from the colon-based effects than from the incredible nausea and the taste that WOULD NOT LEAVE my mouth. gah, it’s making me whoopsie just thinking abou tit.
4. i said tit.
A six foot rubber hose tipped with a silver bullet never was my idea of a friend.
Yeah, it’s like you read my mind when you specified which cavity….
Sounds relatively uncomfortable, but women get to have so many things done to them that can all fall somewhere within the spectrum of that category, it’s harder for me to be that fazed about it. (When I had my gb taken out, they drugged me, numbed me, and apparently had a probe in each end that met somewhere in the middle. Adding insult to injury – I didn’t even find out about this until I read my hospital weeks later….)
…That category as in “Things That Could Be Mortifying for $400, Alex” rather than “Ass-talk.”
Congats, it’s over. Did they have a hd plasma monitor? These things must be the root of all those alien abduction hallucinations. My wife da nurse has been telling me “get thee to the bowel probers” but I guess the Couric Rule technically gives me four more years of reprieve.
i am very glad you cleared up the whole “cavity” thing…. i was starting to wonder about you…