At breakfast on Monday a friend was telling us about her friend who has colon cancer. We started talking about colonoscopies, especially the very funny and informative column by Dave Barry.
Anyway, then another person at the table, let’s call her Kim, who is over 50, said she had a colonoscopy at age 17 with no anesthetic and SHE WILL NEVER DO IT AGAIN.
Keep in mind, she is a nurse and works for an insurance company. She has also had various other surgeries, so she’s not afraid of that in general.
This disconnect between logic and her though process is stunning to me. No matter what we said, she refused to listen. The prep day before the colonoscopy isn’t even as bad as people describe it. And for heaven’s sake, the actual procedure is just oddly easy. Suddenly you wake up, then you go home, eat, and lounge around all day. Big deal. And hopefully you don’t have cancer.
It didn’t even work to remind her about the time several years ago when she and another friend went to lunch with me and we had screwdrivers to prepare for mammograms which I did not want to have. Okay. I don’t like having them. Big deal. It hurts for a few seconds, you hold your breath, voila! You are done and hopefully you don’t have breast cancer.
??
I just had one last summer with no anaesthetic. It was uncomfortable, but not painful, and is certainly repeatable. It’s not like, say, watching Joe Eszterhas movies.
I had the intake interview yesterday and scheduled one. The guy said that if I felt discomfort during the process to wave and he’d up the meds. He prefers having patients sleep through it.
I’m arranging to be driven home and babysat overnight. They require that, just in case.
I’ve been told that the laxatives and enema the day before, and the liquid diet and fast, are more trouble than the actual procedure. Also, they blow air in there, to get a good view. So you spend hours deflating afterwards.
I’m not looking forward to it. But it beats having a baggie strapped to my side.
If, for whatever reason, a colonoscopy is unacceptable to someone, other colon cancer screening methods are available and should be utilized including fecal ocult blood testing (FOBT), sigmoidoscopy (but that’s not likely to be an acceptable choice for a large number of people that find a colonoscopy unacceptable), or x-ray based, “virtual colonscopy.”
My doc said if you have a family history of colon cancer, you should start getting them ten years before the age they were diagnosed. I didn’t feel a thing, but I did fart all day long.
My sister’s friend, now dead at ~40 years old (leaving a husband and young children behind), said her doctor told her she didn’t need it at her age. He refused to order it.
Her cancer was finally diagnosed after it was too late to do anything but watch her die.
Her mother died at a similar age from colon cancer.
It’s not the procedure that scares me, it’s the purging and spending the night on the toilet seat. I’m thinking of having my laptop and guitar in there with me when I do it, so I can at least entertain myself.
When I schedule it, that is. I haven’t gotten around to it.
Waitaminnit! At 17? With no sedative of any kind? Ask her if her boyfriend claimed to be a med student and needed to practice!
To answer Contrary’s question: I don’t know if air is used for a colonoscopy because I was pretty much unconscious for mine. But I do remember the air being injected for a barium enema I had a couple of years before.
I was fine with the whole crowd-of-people-sticking-things-up-my-butt scene – after all, we’re all consenting adults and they were very professional and compassionate about it and tried not to completely erase my dignity. The doctor/technician/whatever said they were going to pump the barium in, and I said fine, and it was a little cool, and I was still fine. Then they said they would extract the barium, and I thought that was damn considerate of ‘em. Then they said they were going to inject air, and I said, “Air!? What air!?” And they said never mind, it would be fine, and so I said fine, and they injected air until I thought I was a Macy’s Parade balloon, but it was fine. They took the X-rays, then thanked me for being so patient and adult about the whole thing, and then everybody left. Without extracting the air. So a nurse came in and told me I could go into the bathroom and “expel” the air. Except that the barium liquid had formed an air-tight seal and no matter what I tried, I could not “expel” the air. Gradually, the discomfort receded as the air went – somewhere, I’m not sure where. So I thought that was fine, and I went back to work, and forgot about the whole thing until lunchtime, when I had my usual Wendy’s Triple-decker, the first food I’d eaten since the previous afternoon. Within about two hours, things turned very un-fine as all of that injected air found its way back into my colon and my empty system kicked into high gear on the triple-decker, fries and milkshake. At about three in the afternoon the barium seal finally cracked. I excused myself, beat a retreat to the restroom and, as I began to “expel” invisible radioactive air, was transformed into Fartron, Son of Flatula, King of the Methanes! I coulda’ levelled Tokyo with that stuff!
But after about 15 minutes, I was “exhausted”, so to speak, and returned to my cubicle. My manager came around and asked if I was OK. I said I was fine.
It’s just another one of those things you do because you should. Like getting your teeth cleaned, which is actually more uncomfortable for me than the colonoscopy that I had. Mine was quite a bit less bad than I expected. The prep was three days of clear liquids, which I thought would be really difficult, but it wasn’t. I had tea, broth, and they allowed hard candy and gumdrops. No pain during the procedure and not really any farting to speak of afterward. In fact, they told me I couldn’t leave until I expelled some air, and I almost had to try to do that. I’d really rather do it again than provide regular stool samples for testing. Somehow the whole “procedure” thing seems less embarrassing.
I did not have a lot of farting. Because farting is…well…un-Lillith-like.
I also did not have any problems the night before in the bathroom. It was just during the day. Sadly, I prefer orange and red Jello and you can only have other colors. I should have tried banana popsicles.
I’m glad you don’t have to do these tests very often.
Maybe my friend is having other kinds of tests done (that someone mentioned), but she didn’t say so. She was just so weird about the whole thing.
But then, I’d been sick for a month, puking and crapping and lost about 1/5 my body weight so maybe I wasn’t a typical case. Even so - the colonoscopy itself was a breeze. I wouldn’t hesitate to get one again if the doc said it was a good idea.
A bit TMI
I’m booked in for a colonoscopy on the 30th of April. I’m having a general anaesthetic (I have a history of sexual assault so that area is very much no go. My doctor is also using this as an opportunty to give me a pelvic exam - something she hasn’t succeeded in doing while I’m concious).
My husband had one a few years ago. He didn’t like it, but he managed. I don’t recall him farting afterward, just being a bit groggy for a while as whatever they gave him to make it bearable wore off.
The funny thing was that we were living in Jakarta at the time and had to go to Singapore to get one. It was the FIRST TIME we took a weekend away from our young son (who stayed home with his nanny).
What should have been a marvelous romantic weekend away was, well … a colonoscopy.
My doctor recommended it. With anaesthetic you’re committed to a bit of a stay while it’s administered, takes effect, and wears off. Without it I could go in, take off my clothes, get probed, put my clothes back on, and go limping off to work.
