Happy 50th to me! I have been off solid food for nearly three hours and going slowly mad. Many of my favorite foods are solid! I made a rookie mistake and scheduled my procedure for 3 pm tomorrow, which means an extra half day without food. I have loaded my fridge with Jello and just have to keep the kids away from it. Heartless little thieves.
The prep is less onerous than what I understand it used to be. In a few hours, I will take a large handful of laxative pills, then a couple of small bottles of OTC liquid laxative over the next several hours, and it’s Katie bar the (bathroom) door.
I’ll keep you all apprised. Subscribe to this thread!
You don’t have to drink the gallon jug of horrible laxative? That was the worst part of the whole thing for me. I had to drink a glass every 20 minutes until at least 1/2 was gone. Then I had to drink the rest the next morning. That stuff was awful. It was salty and would give me the chills. UGH. Not being able to eat was nothing compared to that horrendous jug of awfulness. The actual procedure was nothing - very easy.
A little tip that I discovered when I did mine: if you eat very lightly the day before you start the prep, it’s possible you won’t have to finish the entirety of the 2 gallons of fluid (I may be exaggerating the volume). When I did mine, the doctor told me about some joker she encountered who decided that since he had to stop eating his normal meals, he would go all out and stuff himself silly the day before his prep. That was a HUGE mistake (he wasn’t able to fully flush his system in time).
To confirm my theory after hearing that anecdote, I ate very light the day before, and was outputting clear fluid when I was only 1/5 way through the cleanse. (Just to be sure, I kept drinking it until it unfortunately made me puke. Then I just couldn’t. After the procedure, the doctor confirmed that I was clean and did a good enough prep.
Eh. My guts are kinda sluggish, so I have to keep an eye out for issues. Even though I’d told the doctor’s office this (and referred them to my history, which they had), they told me to use their regular prep routine. As a consequence, my guts were still gurgling when I showed up for the colonoscopy, but the nurses told me not to worry – they’d suck out any excess during the procedure. Which they did, with no adverse consequence.
In talking to the doctor after, he was a bit annoyed that it was something that could have been avoided; he made a deliberate note on my chart. But it’s be 10 years until I have to go back, so I’m sure I’ll have to remind them then. He said that the bigger problem is people eating/drinking colored stuff – particularly red.
I had a colonoscopy last year or the year before. The process involved mixing a powder with Gatorade (not red, never red) that to me had no taste. What I ended up drinking tasted just like Gatorade.
Has anyone else done the procedure in the past two years that still had to drink whatever awful liquid people keep bringing up in these threads? I keep wondering if my doctors had a new, cutting-edge solution to the “awful drink” problem or if what I drank is just now the standard and everyone’s memories of the terrible liquid are merely outdated.
Funny thing about my colonoscopy - I got one because I had been having extremely loose stool for like a year, and I was very nervous about colon cancer as my friend (who was the same age as me) had just died from it. They appeased me by “letting” me get a colonoscopy. The testing showed that I had no medical problem in my colon. And within a few days of the procedure my loose stool cleared up. My primary care doctor surmised that I must have had some sort of infection hanging around in my gut and the prep cleaned it all out. So it wasn’t a total waste…
My wife did hers (1st) a few months ago. She also complained about the awful drink she had to deal with. Her procedure went fine, and we even got some nice photos of the inside of her colon as souvenirs!
I am scheduled for my consultation next week, where the deed (1st) will be scheduled I am sure, and the necessary purge materials will be prescribed.
One thing I have heard of as a potential complication, financially, is that they may tell you that if they encounter a polyp they remove it during the exam. But then the procedure becomes surgery, according to insurance, and it may not be covered (especially if you did not consent, and since you were under anesthesia, how can you consent?). I am not sure of the details, but has anyone heard of this issue?
I am by no means an expert on either medical or insurance issues, but I doubt this is a problem. I recently had a colonoscopy and, as I think is fairly typical, they removed a few polyps. My insurer, Cigna, paid up without a problem.
I then DID have to have surgery, under general anesthesia. As the physician explained it, the tissue changes near the anus - deeper inside your colon you can’t feel much so they can snip stuff out while you are lightly sedated. But people have more nerve endings toward the exit point, so it would be too painful without GA. I scheduled the surgery a few weeks after the colonoscopy. Cigna paid up for that, too. Plus I got photos of some repulsive bloody shreds that were removed! Eww… (Histology was clear on everything, luckily.)
That’s just one person’s experience, and some insurance companies are more evil than others, so my story doesn’t prove anything except that it is possible to have a reasonable insurer in matters colonoscopic.
I’m almost 47 and I’ve had three colonoscopies already (thank you bleeding precancerous polyps!) and possibly my worst mistake was scheduling my second one the day after my cousin’s St. Patrick’s Day party. No corned beef or Guinness for me, just begging for some beef stock for my hungry belly.
I had one a couple of weeks ago, and I had “the awful liquid”. Half a cup, maybe a cup of polyethylene glycol and various salts. Add one gallon of water. Drink half of it the night before, and half of it the morning of. As I got toward the bottom of the jug, the salt flavor seemed to get stronger. To me, the last few salt-flavored cups were less nauseating than the earlier tasteless cups.
They found several small polyps that they snipped of without any problem, and one big mass that was more worrisome. I had to get a CT scan to see just how big a project that was going to be. It turned out, they can do it endoscopically, so I just have to go back in a couple of weeks for another colonoscopy.
Which was a big relief, because my company’s beloved Obamacare-compliant insurance won’t cover either procedure. (My fault for not checking the fine print, but wasn’t that Reid and Pelosi’s pretext for ramming it down our throats in the first place?)
The last time my older brother had a colonoscopy done, the doctor also had him get an endoscopy (our father had esophageal cancer) at the same time, to save cost. I hope they used a fresh tube.
The last time I had one, before the procedure, I sat with a member of the doctor’s team and answered a series of questions. I don’t remember what they all were as it was 5 years ago (I’m getting another done in a couple of weeks), but I suspect that one of the questions was along the line of “Do you have any symptoms that would make you think you have any problems?” I would definitely have answered “no” to any question of this type, as it was the truth.
Well, somehow my procedure went from being coded as routine preventative maintenance, which would have been covered 100% with no co-pay (Thanks, Obama!), to a search for the cause of a (non-existant) problem. It took me months to finally get my insurance to pay for the several hundred dollar charge that the doctor’s billing company kept sending to me every month.
I thought that the awful-tasting drink was for the prep routine that requires a prescription? All the stuff they had me take was over the counter – miralax in Gatoraid, magnesium citrate, laxative pills; only the mag citrate was gagworthy.
From my experience, I think you’d know by 50. My friend’s kid is 5, and seems the same thing as me. Doc described it as “kind of like IBS, but the inverse”, which isn’t actually helpful, but it’s usually just a minor annoyance.
For my prep I had to mix stuff with gatorade. It was the gatorade that ultimately made me puke. That shit tastes nasty. Next time I’ll just do clear chicken stock all the way through.
