I have to prep for a colonoscopy, including a liquid diet the day before. At noon I’m supposed to take four Dulcolax tablets, 5 mg. I happen to be scheduled to run a business meeting from 2:00 to 4:00 and then drive an hour to get home. Is that going to be a disaster? Or do they work slowly enough to not be a problem?
You don’t want to me any more than a few feet from a toilet at any time after taking the Dulcolax.
I agree. Reschedule the meeting or the colonoscopy. Also splurge on the really soft toilet tissue.
ETA: You could check with your practitioner and see if there is an alternative method for the clean-out that would not interfere with your work schedule.
Yep. You can’t do both. Ideally you should be at home.
But honestly, as long as you start the clear liquid diet, you might be able to get away with starting the duco @ 5PM. Call your MD and ask.
I saw what you did there.
Well, allrighty then. Thank you for hypothetically preventing a very unfortunate turn of events indeed.
While we are on the subject, I look forward to picking up any other advance wisdom people are inclined to share!
baby wipes. Nice soft moist baby wipes.
I have a friend who decided to take his laptop into the bathroom and didn’t bother getting up from the toilet once it started.
We mined half a belt in Nein that evening … 
I don’t know what your gastroenterologist says you can drink the day before, but mine said it was okay to have liquid Ensure, which is not a clear liquid. It made the starving the day before completely tolerable. I’m the type who gets headachey and faint if I’m fasting, so this was a lifesaver.
And I saw the live footage of my procedure - there was absolutely nothing in there, so the Ensure didn’t cloud the issue at all.
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It’s assholes all the way down…
Also, allow time after the procedure (12-24 hours, at least) for your intestines to get back into normal working order.
So don’t try to go in to work later the same day. Can you work from home the next morning? And don’t schedule any lengthy meetings for your first day back at work. You may still need to get to a toilet suddenly.
More importantly, your brain might not be working quite right for the 24 hours or so after the procedure. We warn people not to create any new passwords or work on important memory tasks for the day following the procedure. The Versed they commonly give to make you not care that someone is ramming a garden hose up your rear is an amnesiac - it makes you not remember that someone is ramming a garden hose up your rear. Unfortunately, the effects can linger, even when you think you’re thinking and remembering things just fine, and later on you go to use your new email account and…the password is just nowhere in your brain. It just wasn’t stored there.
So try to find things to do at work that don’t require a lot of thought or retaining much. Perhaps the CEO would let you do his job for a day. 
Also, take a course of probiotics afterwards too.
No one seems to have told you how it works yet, so FYI what it does depends on the type of Dulcolax. The main kink, and what you’ve been given from the sound of it, is basically a stimulant for the nerve endings in your large intestine and colon which causes the muscles to work harder/contract more.
What I find more interesting is the stool softener version. It basically works as an emulsifier, mixing all the fatty stuff (presumed to be) in your intestines with the hard stuff, and basically making your shit easier for your body to pass through (think warm butter instead of cool cheese). It’s my innner nerd coming out but these “mechanical” solutions to body problems fascinate me.
This may be OBE by now but when I had a similar regimen… I was on a liquid diet starting on a Saturday. I was to take 2 Dulcolax at 6 PM (it was more like 9 PM; we were travelling that day). The effect manifested the next afternoon (a couple of hours before I was slated to drink the Drano).
As others have noted, you shouldn’t do anything requiring any judgement for the 24 hours after the procedure. When you come out from the sedation, you may feel relatively alert, but I’ve found that an hour or so after that, my body says “yeah, just kidding, nap time in 3… 2… 1… lights out!”.
The last 2 times (yeah, I’ve had 3, and am looking forward to having them a couple times a year for basically the rest of my life), I had the unpleasant effect of a rerun of the cleanout effect, just after I got home and ate something. I assume this was because of the body’s tendency to make the bowels wake up after a meal. Unfortunately in those circumstances, it was rather a LOT more urgent than usual and, well, mess ensued.
FYI - another poster mentioned Versed, but I’ve always been given “Milk of Amnesia” (Propofol). Which works just fine - it’s mildly entertaining watching the room start to spin… for about a half second, then it’s Lights Out! Only problem with the stuff is it burns like a motherfuck when they first inject it. Nowadays they’ve taken to giving a brief dose of lidocaine or something into the IV first - but as with every other medical procedure I’ve had involving local anesthesia, they’re in too much of a damn hurry to let the numbing take effect. :rolleyes:
The prep I followed actually allowed a strictly defined breakfast the day before…a can of ensure, half a piece of dry toast and an unbuttered egg. It helped make the ordeal easier.
And I saw my procedure as it was happening…I think I started staring at the monitor before the drugs completely kicked in, but I actually never went fully to sleep or lost awareness, I had no sense of time but I remember watching, I remembering noticing the change in the picture as the camera went from the large intestine to the small…the large pink tunnel turned into a small grey one…and I remember the doctor taking another “pass” or two around the suspicious area ( I had the procedure because my doctor thought (imagined ) that she felt something during a routine physical).
Except for the prep it was pretty cool, except I was incredibly thirsty and wanted lots of water after, but all they would give me in the recovery room were these little cups of apple juice…I guzzled several of them and my insurance company was billed like ten bucks each for them.
Luxury! Nobody offered me anything to drink afterwards. And at $10 a drink, I’m glad they didn’t.
I had my husband bring me a quadruple espresso to quaff while they gave him the discharge data. I had not had any caffeine the morning of the procedure, and my head was ready to explode from withdrawal. Then we went out to Vietnamese pho right afterwards.
Thanks for all the great advice. I went to the grocery store and bought various clear liquid foodstuffs, and a big box of baby wipes. Plus, we have a lot of cats, and I never miss the opportunity to buy out the store’s stock of unscented kitty litter in ten pound bags. It dawned on me while in the checkout line that my cart contents might arouse suspicion, but by that time I had enough of worrying about it and determined to let them wonder.