Maybe it was. I know that sedation for certain procedures is more common in the US than in Europe. And that it was more common to go without sedation in the past. My mom had one without sedation when she was fairly young.
My gag reflex is elicited contemplating it without some heavy sedation.
When I had a stent placed in a coronary artery, I had some fentanyl and something else. I accused the anesthesia person of watering down my cocktail, as I didn’t feel the least bit high. No pain, no anxiety, but no high. They really had it dialed in!
To be clear, they did give her something to paralyze her throat. The main issue was that it felt like she couldn’t breathe, causing panic.
Totally understandable. I had a root canal where a bunch of lidocaine froze up my throat and it was absolutely the most horrifying medical experience of my life. I didn’t say a peep or make a sound, but for about an hour I was internally panicking and having to convince myself that I was, in fact, actually breathing.
They didn’t even give me that, but nothing, nada. Though pain wasn’t the issue, but that panic when they ram those tubes down your throat and pump your stomach full of air, the resulting constant monster burping, feeling at the cusp of throwing up all the time and hardly being able to breathe. It was horrific.
Like @kayaker, I got a coronary stent around the same time. I don’t remember if they gave me Valium or something like that, definitely nothing as strong as Fentanyl, but that procedure was a picnic compared to the gastroscopy.
Well, the doctor found Cancer. They haven’t said what type
But, his estranged son Harry is reportedly returning to see him.
Charles has been known for a rigerous diet and lifestyle. Hopefully he will respond well to treatment.
Wishing him the best thoughts and prayers.
Link King Charles III diagnosed with cancer, Buckingham Palace says
Link The Foods King Charles Eats Every Day To Remain Healthy at 73 — Eat This Not That
From the BBC
He had a prostate procedure at a private London hospital more than a week ago.
At the time, the Palace said the treatment was for a “benign” condition.
“It was during this intervention that a separate issue of concern was noted and subsequently diagnosed as a form of cancer,” it said on Monday.
If it wasn’t a full workup with blood tests, I would think testicular cancer or melanoma would be likely things for a doc to pick up.
I will refrain from morbid jokes, as much as I dislike him, he doesn’t deserve this.
There’s no automatic regency. To initiate a regency, Camilla would have to get together with a couple of senior judges and politicians to confirm the king’s infirmity, and then William would become Regent.
I’m concerned for William and his family. His wife just had abdominal surgery. They didn’t say the reason. But she was hospitalized for about 10 days and is expected to convalesce for two to three months.
That sounds like pretty serious surgery to me.
Now William has to step up and fill in for Charles at engagements.
Serving the people is part of the job. It can be a burden at times.
Same Here. At 73 I’ve had many more than a few, from male and female MD’s. I just don’t understand all the whining and bitching about it.
For what it’s worth, a prostate digital exam (for screening purposes, absent symptoms) is no longer the standard of care in the US. I do always get PSA level with my bloodwork at annual checkup, but I’m honestly not sure if there’s much evidence supporting that method of screening either, the official recommendation is pretty vague, but it seems to be favored over the digital exam.
Probably the fault of the uncontrollable giggling at your story, but it took me a couple of re-reads to figure out that when you spoke of a “custodian” coming in to “empty your garbage can”, it was not in fact a euphemism for further rectal procedures. 
These are some of the most arbitrariily privileged people on earth. I’m not going to be a jerk and express anything but sympathy about the fact that he has cancer, but please don’t start claiming that their life is difficult.
I get my Pap & pelvics from my family practice doctor, a man who’s on the verge of retirement, and one day, I was in the stirrups and IDR what I said, but he sort of groaned a bit and said, “People have no idea how many times a day we have to do this.”
He also does a rectal exam (with permission) and I was surprised to find out that most doctors don’t do that. I mean, why not? It’s, ahem, right there.
BTW, at my old hospital, we had a medical resident who was in her 30s and had several children. She said that her 8-year-old daughter thought she wanted to be a doctor too, “until she found out that doctors have to stick their fingers up people’s butts.” My niece was about that age and also wanted to be a doctor too, but her parents and I all agreed that we should wait a few years before telling her that LOL. (She’s pursuing a degree in public health; IDK if she’s still thinking about medical school.) I’m guessing that after learning that tidbit, she would come home and her daughter would probably ask - well, you can guess the rest.
Anyway, we’re speculating that it’s most likely bladder or rectal cancer (testicular cancer is mostly a disease of men under 30) and if he wants us to know the details, he will tell us, just like Kate and her recent health issues.
And the answer is right there 3 posts above, it’s not the standard of care.
There’s always a cost-benefit to screening, the cost in this case being principally the negative consequences from interventions consequent to false positive cancer diagnoses.
When I was taking my gap year after graduating from high school (1981-82) one of my co-workers, who was the same age and got married during this time, joked that she could imagine a gynecologist coming home and telling his wife over dinner, “I saw the best pussy today!” I know now, and I’m sure she does too, that this would be highly unethical, but we still giggled about it.
Another woman I knew around this time said she asked her GYN, “How can you do this all day, and then go home and have sex with your wife?” He replied, “Do you think about your typewriter when you go home? I don’t think about this either; to me, it’s just a job.”
More recently, I worked in an area where there was a female urologist in the next town over who specialized in treating erectile dysfunction. Same thing there, in reverse; her husband was an anesthesiologist at that town’s hospital.
I do know that a rectal exam was, at one part, a routine part of screening for appendicitis. Not sure what you could find out from that (calling Qadgop, DSeid, etc.) but I’ve heard they don’t usually do that nowadays.
I always thought that the digital exam would only reveal enlargement of the prostate, and you couldn’t accurately diagnose cancer without a biopsy (which in the past few years has been superseded by an MRI of a newer, more accurate kind, that comes before the biopsy). My own experience a dozen years ago, when my PSA 'jumped up" a couple of points, was that the urologist (who seemed very proud of this ability) first went in and did a very, very thorough digital exam, such that he could describe some places where my prostate was not uniform in its shape (i.e. nodes or something). But he acknowledged that this proved nothing about cancer. So then the happy bastard gave me a biopsy, with only local anesthesia, because why not?
Hot tip to all middle-aged and older men: I have been told by my new urologist that other factors besides cancer can raise the PSA score. One is age, about which you can do nothing, but which your doctor should take into account. Another is sex. You should stop having any form of sexual activity, including masturbation, at least 3 days before your blood draw that includes a PSA test. Something about sex apparently irritates the prostate or something, causing it to put out more of what PSA measures.
Let’s not get carried away here. It’s all about having a reliable baseline. A similar wild orgy before every test is probably okay too.
It’s easier to plan on abstention than to plan just the right amount of sex.
No doubt the royals enjoy a level of privilege most people will never achieve, but it seems to me that being a royal, especially being next in line, has to be a tremendous burden on the soul. From the day you’re born it’s drilled into your head that you’re the symbol of an entire nation and a thousand-year tradition that’s weirdly entangled with late medieval theology that nobody really believes in anymore but has to pay lip service to because your country’s system of government is based on a legal fiction that you along were hand-selected by God to be His earthly herald. You’re constantly expected to carry yourself a certain way in public. Countless career paths are closed off to you because of who you are, and in the ones you can pursue you can only go so far before you get roped into spending all your time performing ceremonial duties that simultaneously mean nothing and everything. Your personal life is constant fodder for tabloid speculation and privacy is next to impossible. You’ll never be allowed to express your personal opinions out loud or actually try to do anything meaningful to improve the country you’re nominally going to be in charge of because it wouldn’t be proper for you to disagree with the politicians your subjects have picked to tell you what to do and what to say you think. And even if you’re not the immediate heir to the throne, you still have all of that pressure except that your only purpose in life is to be the backup in case your older sibling dies.
I can understand why Prince Harry wanted out.