This is a deeply personal reminiscence, as many of you will infer by the fact that I’m sharing it with thousands of strangers right here.
I mean, a colonoscopy isn’t supposed to be a big adventure. But I’m a man who’s on the wrong end of 55, my doctor felt one was due, and as a fellow who’s seen cancer hit unexpectedly on people who deserved better, I finally decided that this was a thing I needed to be responsible about.
So I made the appointment, and followed through. The worst part was three days of no solid food and a clear liquid diet. I mean, I know WHY, but that didn’t make it any more fun; by day three, jello and chicken broth no longer sated the hunger, and I was operating on sheer willpower, grating irritation, and an intense desire to have this OVER with, durnit.
And I went to the colonoscopy outfit, wondering the whole time, "Is colonoscopies all they DO here? Wow. Someone sat in his science class in fourth grade and thought, “I wanna open a practice that charges thousands of dollars to do NOTHING but shove things up people’s butts, all day long.” Was THAT how it happened? And I doffed my duds and shrugged into the usual embarrassing gown, and they shot me up with anaesthetic.
And that was their first mistake. And, sadly, mine as well.
It’s been years since I had anaesthetics, for fun or for reasons, and I’d forgotten my usual warnings, the ones I tell the doctors every time, and they either believe me, or they don’t and find out the hard way.
Y’see, some anaesthetics don’t work on me. And others do, but not very WELL. Some opiates, and some synthetics, affect me the way a glass of orange juice affects most people: not at all. They don’t use Darvon much these days, for which I am grateful, because NONE of the Darvon family does diddly to me. Mom had some major back issues, and did I mention that I was born back in the early sixties, when the cure for prenatal back pain was a bottle of painkillers? A LOT of drugs just don’t WORK on me.
But I had forgotten that. And I didn’t tell the doctors. So they shot me up with happy juice, and had me count backwards, and it all SEEMED to work okay; I think I made it to seven before the world got fuzzy.
Trouble is, I woke up perhaps fifteen minutes later.
For a certain value of woke, that is. I lay there on my side, wondering where I was and if I cared much; I was comfortable enough. Except that my butt seemed to be hanging out to the wind. Hey, who were THESE people? What were they doing in my bedroom? Where was my wife?
A bulletin from Outer Mongolia arrived, and read: Yer at the colonoscopy clinic, fool. They shot you up with happy juice .
Ah. Well. Nothing to worry about, then. What’s that on TV? It looks like…what DOES it look like? My eyes didn’t want to focus.
The messenger from Outer Mongolia left with the question, and arrived about a week later: It’s your colonoscopy, fool. You and the doctor and the rest of his team have it up on a big TV. You’re looking at the inside of your own large intestine, as seen through a tiny probe at the end of a wire jammed up your bahonkus .
Another message showed up around then: You’re having trouble focusing because you’re high, ya nit. Yer high as a kite, high as a treeful of monkeys atop Mount Everest, passin’ a dootchie and observing the view.
The view.
The view .
“Pan left,” said the doctor. “What’s that over there? Oh, all right, we’re good, not a polyp. Note that on the log. All right, proceed.”
I couldn’t see the tech, but I could feel him doing SOMETHING back there, and the view in the pink cave on the screen straightened and began to move forward.
I was enchanted. “It’s the PINK CAVE SHOW, starring the BIG PINK CAAAAVE!” I thought to myself. “Hey, are there goblins in there? Or a dragon? (mental snicker) Butt goblins and ass dragons, woohoo!”
The probe continued ahead, and I watched, rapt. I became aware of a woman sitting near my feet, typing on a laptop, as well as the doctor, up near my head.
None of them had noticed I was awake.
I became aware of how surrealistic the situation was… I was watching a TV show being broadcast from inside my own abdomen. It was like… taking your own head off to get a better look inside it! How weird was THAT?
With some effort, I could focus on what the doctor was saying. They were looking for polyps and anything that seemed precancerous, and not finding anything. That made me happy. Meanwhile, I was hypnotized by the grandeur of the mighty caverns we were all traversing together… the USS Optiprobe, exploring the Bedlam Nebula… while Captain Doctor made verbal notes for Nurse Uhura, and Scotty was back there doing something with the probe to make it go…
I was overcome with the power of this technology, and its extreme usefulness in having a good look at something that’s normally pretty hard to see… Going Where No One Has Gone Before! What was a large intestine FOR, anyway? Oh, yeah, said the messenger from Outer Mongolia, and he skipped off and brought back an old reference from college biology that snapped sharply into my mind: the large intestine’s main job is reabsorbing water from fecal matter, conserving the H20 and recirculating it into the body, as opposed to wasting it on getting the stuff out of the body .
It was amazing. This little tube of flesh, not even big enough to manage a golf ball, but on the big screen, it looked HUGE, like a subway tunnel… no, like Carlsbad Caverns, majestic, dark, and secret, yet no further away than inside my own middle. No one had EVER been here, unless you count me, and even I’d never SEEN it before! And for a while, I lay there, enjoying the trip while one neuron nattered on about polyps, and another one recited a biology lecture from forty years ago, and yet a third tried to track what the doctor was saying…
Abruptly, the screen changed. The tunnel was blocked. What WAS that thing?
“And that’s it,” said the doctor. “Anterior sphincter. Trip’s over, magical mystery tour is done. Log it and begin probe withdrawal.”
I was a little disappointed. I’d been enjoying the ride. How long had I been WATCHING, anyway? But perhaps now Berni and I could go out and I could get some solid food. Magical mystery tour is over. A GUIDED tour. Good thing there was no tour bus (mental snicker) …
Magical mystery tour.
Magical mystery tour .
An obedient neuron ran off and retrieved the song from long term storage and put it on PLAY for me.
Did I mention that none of the medical team had noticed I was awake? I would learn later that I was the first person who’d ever woke up on their table.
“THE MAAAAAGICAL MYS-TER-RY TOUR IS WAITING TO TAAAAKE YOU AWAAAAY, WAITING to take you AWAAAAAA-AAAY!” I belted out, aloud, in my best Paul McCartney impression.
The doctor screamed, jumped, and dropped his iPad.
The nurse jerked hard, almost dropped her laptop, and barked a bad word. “Holy @%$#, he’s AWAKE!”
I heard a crash behind me; I would later find that the probe tech had kicked himself backwards, startled, and had fallen backwards onto the floor, along with his chair.
Strangely enough, none of this seemed hugely important, although I did greet the medical team; good manners, after all.
At which point, I then continued with the rest of the song; it seemed important to do so, for some reason. “ROLL AAAAAAHHHP! ROLL AHP FOR THE MYS-TER-RY TOUR! SATISFACTION GUARANTEEEEEED!”
I do remember that a rather rattled doctor put his hand on my shoulder and assured me that everything would be fine, just fine; I wondered why he was pressing on my shoulder. Was he afraid I was going to jump off the table? Meanwhile, the tech scrambled to his feet and began reeling in the probe line. Meanwhile the nurse frantically checked the time stamps on everything. Nothing was wrong. By all rights, I should have been out cold. Instead, I was wide awake, albeit quite stonkered, and doing a Paul McCartney impression.
I do remember being a bit irritated with myself. I have a fine singing voice, but I don’t sound a thing like McCartney.
I also can tell you now that if you held me at gunpoint, I couldn’t remember all the words to “Magical Mystery Tour,” but blitzed out of my mind that day in a colonoscopy clinic? Never missed a beat…
Now I am wondering whether I’m having a curious case of selective perception or there really are many more descriptions about colonoscopies by men than by women, and if so why this may be. I mean, it’s about the colon, not the prostate, right? And what would a woman have 
Thank you!