Wish me well, for one week from today I will be kidnapped and anally probed. And I don’t even live in a trailer park.
At my last exam, Cheerful Foreignovich, MD, announced in a hatefully upbeat tone that I had blood in a Highly Personal and Unmentionable Area. “It’s probably nothing, but just to be sure, I would like to insert an instrument the length of a pool cue where no man has gone before and have a peek. Don’t worry,” said, he, with that completely un-reassuring smile they always get. “It will be nothing.”
Apparently inserting his arm halfway to the shoulder up my innocent and unsuspecting keister has lost its glamor for him, and he wishes to introduce gadgets into the relationship. This is a point I have not reached even with the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan, and she doesn’t even have hair growing out of her ears. Not that she’s any help - she has already had a colonoscopy, as part of a medical study she agreed to take part in. I can see the attraction in having a gander up her butt, but my hairy ass?
But all she will do is smile at me and remind me to put toilet paper on the shopping list. Apparently I must undergo a process of inner cleansing to prepare the way for the shaman to remove my anal virginity. This involves laxatives that emphatically do not market themselves to people looking for “gentle, overnight relief”. More like a nuclear holocaust in your bowels, and make sure there is a clear path to the toilet within ten minutes after your first dose. It actually says on the instructions that I should not get too far from plumbing, and my dear wife keeps nodding her head and saying, “Believe it, dear.”
:eek:
So this is what lies in wait for old Shodan - hollow me out like a Halloween pumpkin, slip a garden hose up my bum, and snap a few dozen Polaroids of my inner workings for the edification of the medical establishment.
If I get copies, I will see if I can post them here. I have already offered them to my daughter to post on her Facebook page, but she didn’t think it was a good idea.
My wife’s colon cancer was detected during her first colonoscopy at age 50. Yes, the preparation is the worst part (the drugs given just prior to the procedure put her right out), but it beats the alternative of either being eaten alive from the inside out or having your anus moved to your side so you can shit in a bag for the rest of your life.
In your quest to embarrass your daughter, I think you may have hit the jackpot here.
On a serious note, I hope it all goes well. It really isn’t as bad as it sounds. And this might be venturing into TMI territory, but the whole “cleansing” process wasn’t as bad for me as it sounds. Maybe it’s just the regimen my clinic uses, but I didn’t have the explosions and get-out-of-my-way racing to the bathroom everybody else seems to talk about. Or maybe I’m just weird. If you’re lucky you will be, too.
After the 2nd upper GI I have been avoiding my family doctor like the plague, as I recall he wanted a good look from both ends. Good luck with your procedure, better you than me.
For me the ingestion of the laxatives was worse than the expulsion. But the advice of staying close to the toilet is valid. The actual procedure is a piece of cake.
When they get that tube up your keister and there’s no elbow room to wiggle around, they shoot some air in there to swell you up. That’s all well and good until you’re in a crowded recovery room afterwards and they tell you to force all the air back out. In my hospital we were all in a big round room facing each other. It’s weird man, farting for the floor, like some bizarre kind of rectal recital given to a captive audience.
kalhoun - Geez, that’s the way to make lemonade out of life’s lemons.
Shodan - Good luck to you. I had to do the cleansing thing (I think) before I had my gallbladder out. Fasting (nothing but liquids) two days before the procedure and that nasty lemon-lime stuff the night before. It really was no big deal, except for the hunger.
I agree that the laxative tastes foul. And that it’s the worst part of the procedure. Although I did get thirsty that morning, what with not being allowed to drink even water and the procedure being scheduled for 1 PM.
There was an IV, the insertion of which went smoothly. There were also drugs, which totally put the thirst thing out of my mind. I didn’t fall asleep, but watched the whole procedure on the monitor in kind of a sleepy reverie. It did not hurt and I didn’t even get bored. They taped a video, but only gave me a polaroid of the farthest end, where the large intestine meets the small.
After, in the recovery room, the nurse encouraged me to ‘expell air’. She very gently reassured me that it wasn’t my air, it was the doctor’s air. It wasn’t until I was at home, with the drugs ebbing, that thinking about expelling someone else’s air became immensely funny.
Oh, and it’s not just a camera and air that gets inserted. There’s also a light, so the camera can see, and a water hose that the doctor controls to wash away the last of the mustard-yellow film to get to the pink colon wall. I bet someone, somewhere has made a video game out of this, for training purposes.
I predict that you will sail through the whole thing. You will come out, not only with a child-annoying picture, but some good, child-annoying stories. Seven days and counting. Good luck.
I’ve had a clean out due to a kidney scan. That was no fun, and I was starving because I couldn’t eat for 24 hours.
However, my SIL was told not to eat, but she drank water, because no one told her not to. So, after obediently ingesting all the laxatives, when she shows up at the doctor’s office they told her they couldn’t do the procedure because she’d been drinking water. They didn’t want to give her the anesthesia for fear she vomited while under.
So, what did she do?
She had it done WITHOUT anesthesia! The doctor warned her once he started he was going to finish, but she said to do it anyway. She had one moment when they went around the bend that was very uncomfortable, so she asked him to stop, did her Lamaze breathing (the nurses laughed, because they knew what she was doing and why) and told him to keep going. The procedure was successfully completed, and the doctor said he’d only had two other patients, both male, do it sans anesthesia.
Heh, I had an upper endoscopy last year, and I was in the same recovery room as the dudes getting the lower. The nurse was was rating each fart. “Oh, that was a 5 at best. Let’s hear an 8!”
Good luck Shodan, get a laptop with wireless so you post from the can during your “night of a thousand waterfalls”!
Very well, thanks. They removed about 18" of her colon and she got a clear colonoscopy one year later. She now has to go back in 3 years for a follow-up, and then back to a 5 year schedule if she’s still clear.
The subject has some funny elements to it, but really is very serious business. Colon cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths and it is very difficult to treat if it is advanced.
Best of luck on the procedure. Aside from the prep, my wife’s biggest complaint was they couldn’t schedule hers until late afternoon so she had to wait all day to eat.
At the last hospital I worked at, my boss needed an upper GI endoscopy done - to rule out ulcers, IIRC. I’d had the same thing a few months prior and was told that without question, I absolutely had to have someone drive me home, due to the sedation. Even getting on a train to go home was ruled out because they worried I’d have a loopy moment and fall in front of it or get on the wrong one or something. Fortunately a coworker lived near me.
He was told the same thing, and being unable to arrange transportation among family, he didn’t ask any of us. Oh no. He had them do the endoscopy, down his throat, sans sedation.
:eek:
I just… I mean, I’m assuming they used some kind of topical anesthetic to help with the gag reflex, but… damn.
