Just curious, but I’ve done a gazillion chest x-rays, and I’ve never used iodinated contrast for any of them. What were they looking for, if I may ask?
Since the OP’s question has been answered, and since several folks here have mentioned having colonoscopies, rather than start a new thread, perhaps I can embark on a slight hijack.
I’m having my first colonoscopy on Thursday, so sometime tomorrow afternoon I have to start drinking four liters of Nulytely. A friend of mine who’s been there (and some of the previous posters in this thread) say that this is much worse than the actual procedure. So my questions are:
What’s so unpleasant? It’s just like a bad case of diarrhea, right? I’ll be going to the bathroon frequently for a few hours, and clearing out my intestines. Is is painful or just uncomfortable?
How can I make it less unpleasant?
I’m supposed to start drinking the stuff Wednesday afternoon. I’m permitted a normal breakfast and light lunch, but since I never have breakfast anyway, I’m thinking I just won’t eat anything at all tomorrow before starting on the laxative. Good or bad idea?
What about the flavor? I’ve got cherry, orange, pineapple and lemon-lime flavor packs. I’m thinking that four liters of cherry or orange could become pretty cloying, so I’m leaning toward the lemon-lime as least objectionable. Your recommendations?
Anything else I should know or do? Thanks.
Yeah, the diarrhea sucks. The not eating sucks. For me, what is so horriffic is the taste of the drink, which is why I recommended getting the pill version from the doctor. If you can take the taste, you’re fine. Just stay home, within close reach of the toilet, and enjoy the purging.
Sure, and King Kong is just a large gorilla. Enjoy having stomach acid eat away at the tender lining of your nether regions. And for the love of my baby girl may I never have another colonoscopy so long as I live.
What laxative did you get, and what flavor?
Hmmmm. I hadn’t heard about this part. I may be sorry I asked, but could you say a little more about this?
Another question I meant to ask: From the time I start drinking the stuff, how long before the first…errr…symptoms…set in, and how long from then until I’m all cleaned out?
There are any number of laxatives and combinations of laxatives and enemas that your doctor might choose, which makes predicting specific reactions next to impossible.
What I find worst is that your intestines are in a constant rumble from the time you start, which is the previous afternoon. And the constant diarrhea - and threat of leaking/squirting - irritates the anal lining something fierce, which makes each subsequent squirt more and more painful. So you start out feeling awful, it gets worse for hours, ends up being painful, while you can’t eat any solids. And there’s a couple more hours at the hospital. The sedation for the procedure is the best part.
The only endoscopy I had was done to rule out celiac disease where the doc had to take a sample of my small intestine.
I was given the option of a sedative called Midazolam or nothing at all so I opted to tough it out. Little did I realize the treat I was in for. I was lying on my side and he used an anesthetic spray on the back of my throat. Next was the insertion of a scope down my throat into my esophagus and being told that air would be pumped into my stomach and that I should refrain from belching. That was the most stupid thing to say because immediately I let out the biggest braaaaaach!! anyone’s ever heard, it even scared me. All the while I was glued to the Sony tv monitor watching the scope descend my food tube into the sphincter at the entrance to my stomach and then into my duodenum. He inserted some kind of snippy device that pinched off a small piece of my intestine for examination. It didn’t hurt a bit cuz I guess there are no pain sensors in the small intestine. When he finished doing the biopsy he started pulling the scope back into my stomach and snapped a souvenir polaroid shot of my stomach wall which was a rosy pink. Up the scope travelled till it got to my vocal cords where I held a sonorous high note to observe the cords vibrating. The scope was then removed and I was given my souvenir pic and hopped off the table. What I experienced would have enthralled me tremendously had it been shown on Discovery Channel.
They specify citrate of soda here. Usually one, sometimes two trips to unload does the trick and no diarrhea like irritations. Other times has done a thorogh colonic irrigation. No irritation.
I didn’t mind the diarrhea, what bothered me was trying to drink a gallon of mystery goop. After about half a gallon, my body was telling me that it had all the fluids it needed, you can stop now. It got worse as I finished off the last half gallon. I got quite nauseous. I was already well hydrated from the IV fluids that they were pumping into me. The doctor told me that if I didn’t drink the entire contents of the jug, he would delay the procedure for 24 hours, and I would have to drink another gallon of mystery goop.
It helps if you make the stuff with very cold water. It masks the funny taste and makes it go down easier.
I’ve had 5 or 6 upper GIs as part of a procedure called esophogeal dilatation - a procedure to ease the esophogeal damage caused by acid reflux. All of the procedures were without sedation because I didn’t want to trouble family/friends to have to haul me home afterwards. Like everyone else has said - it’s no big deal. Worrying about it before hand is the worst part. It’s the IV that “shivers me timbers”.
Oh, gosh, I’ve had so many. I had testicular cancer when I was 24, so that meant a good, thorough prostate exam just in case (yowza!) and myariad CT scans, which require drinking barium (IIRC) to clean our your innards. Then, because of all the aspirin I was taking, my stomach got all messed up, I was scoped for that (from both ends, but at different times); then I’ve had blood in the stool, which turned out to be internal hemorrhoids (I think I started a TMI, GQ thread on that, but I can’t recall—it would have been a while back). So, I’ve had quite a few coctails, and I cannot tell you which one was which, and what specific experiences went with what.
What I can tell you is that they are all nasty to drink, IMO. Now, I must add caveat lector here, because everybody I have talked to has not found the taste to be as horriffic as I found it to be; I may be a special case. It helps if you can chug it; take each dosing as quickly as you can, and if you are one of those who can win a beer chugging competition, chug it like that. Don’t taste it.
The taste is why I recommended the pills, if possible.
Reading the responses above, I’m now recalling it being a little hard on the anus, but I don’t know if it was acids or just tenderness from wiping so much. Either way, maybe try applying some A&D ointment or vaseline on (and maybe just inside) your anus, that might help prevent discomfort. Let us know, it may be a good trick to keep on hand.
All told, apart from the taste, I really didn’t find the experience to be that bad. Unpleasant? Yes, but compared to some of the medical stuff I’ve been through, I don’t consider it to be a big deal. Just stay home, find out what you can eat (clear jello, broth, or whatever they say is okay) and have plenty of it on hand, and make sure one bathroom is reserved for your use. Oh, and have toilet paper—and maybe a wet wipe.
Then get down and dirty: it helps keep you humble! 
While I was in medical school, I’d often sign up to be a paid guinea pig for various experiments. Hey, I needed the money, and it’s something many med students do.
One experiment was to see if some medication would cause stomach ulcers. They gave me pills (I don’t know if they were the med or the placebo) to take for two weeks, and then did an upper endoscopy to look at my stomach lining. The only convenient time for me to come in for it was in the morning, and I had class afterwards, so I told them not to bother with any sedation. Just numb my throat with some topical anesthetic spray and go. My only condition was that they had to put one of the monitors where I could watch too.
Thus, I got to watch my own endoscopy. I gagged a bit, and it sure felt strange to have something poking around in my stomach, but otherwise it was no problem.
Yeah, I know… everyone says I’m nuts.
G
P.S. In case anyone is curious, I earned $300, big money to a broke med student in the mid 90’s
What can I say? You’re fasting and you’ve got powerful urges, so the only thing flowing through your digestive tract is stomach acid. Yippee!
Thanks to everyone who responded to my mini-hijack. It’s all over now, and I have to say that it wasn’t as bad as I might have expected, considering what I’d heard here and elsewhere. (Warning: possibly TMI below.)
The colonoscopy itself was nothing. The light sedative did its job, and it seemed to go quite quickly, possibly because I may have been out for part of it. I was watching on the monitor in the beginning, and don’t recall going out or waking up, but I don’t recall much more, either.
The effects of the laxative last night were not the best way to spend an evening, but not the nightmare I had been imagining. As I mentioned above, I decided not to eat anything at all on Wednesday before starting out. I think this helped.
The instructions with the med said to take it until all four liters were gone or until the stool was watery, clear, and entirely liquid. Since I had eaten nothing since Tuesday night and had pooped a couple times before starting, I figured there wouldn’t be that that much to come out, so I might not have to drink it all. I started at about 5:00, drinking eight ounces every 15 minutes as directed.
The effects started to kick in about 6:15 or 6:30, and pretty soon there was nothing but liquid coming out. I kept drinking the stuff until 7:00, finishing about two liters. In the last hour the color kept lightening and although it never became colorless, at the end it was a very light yellow, like urine. I decided that was enough.
By 8:00 I came out of the bathroom and except for a few little burbles and lots of peeing to rid myself of all the water and lemonade I had been drinking, the rest of the night was okay, if not 100% tip-top. (I was rather hungry, too, of course.) At the very end I got a little soreness and saw a little pink on the toilet paper from the acid that someone mentioned, but it wasn’t too bad.
Drinking all four liters of the laxative would have extended the unpleasantness for another couple of hours at least, and that would probably have made things significantly nastier. I think my fasting strategy worked pretty well.
So thanks, all, for the advice.
I have a colonoscopy coming up and there is a question I’ve been wanting to ask…does anything leak out of your backside after the procedure is over? Or is everything back to normal.
Also, how out of it are you for the rest of the day? There’s an errand I wanted to run on the same day and I’m wondering if I’ll be in good enough shape to do it.
Thanks.
After the procedure, no. The night before, after the laxative has finished its work and there’s no liquid still coming out, I had some farts that were rather juicy.
I was very slightly high for about an hour after they took me off the table. I probably would have been safe to drive home–I’m only about a mile from the
doctor’s office–but I was glad I had someone to give me a ride. But after taking it easy for another hour or so (now two hours after the procedure) I was completely normal, and did some work and chores and felt fine the rest of the day.
No leaking. Back to normal.
Don’t schedule anything for that day. You might feel fine, but you are required to have someone drive you home. It’s not so much the procedure but the sedation that kind of wipes you out. Everybody reacts a little differently, and different doctors use different stuff.
The other thing to remember is that you will have had your insides evacuated the night before and have had nothing to eat for many hours. That doesn’t make you look and feel your best.
If you end up feeling fine, then by all means run your errand. But I wouldn’t schedule anything that you would have to commit to ahead of time.