A word to those who say the procedure isn’t all that bad. This is correct, IF you have the sense to take the freakin’ meds! I have a fairly high pain tolerance (for instance, once letting a class drill a hole in a leg bone without anesthesia to test the new IO drill.) so I decided to forego the sedatives. Halfway through it hurt enough to change my mind, and I asked for the meds. “Good idea,” the surgeon told me, “because that was the easy half.”
One side effect of the procedure was a guinea pig.
I was very hazy in the aftermath and remember Mrs. Nyvaak taking me home and tucking me in, asking, “are you OK to sleep it off while I go out shopping?” I responded something like, “mm-bzz-mumble-yeah-surrrre.” Next after that she was shaking me awake, asking “Can we get a guinea pig?!” Again: “mm-bzz-mumble-yeah-suuurre.” Thus Puck arrived in our household and eventually Hoolie and Sam.
Take warning by me. Get the offered sedatives, but only after a solemn compact with family members that nothing agreed to while under the influence will be binding.
Huh, I had my one colonoscopy without any meds, and it was fine. It was crampy and uncomfortable as they shoved the tube up my colon, but honestly, it hurt more getting an IUD inserted. (for which they don’t offer meds.) And once the tube was all the way up, it really didn’t hurt at all. They did the actual exam pulling it out, and I found the exam fascinating. I’m very happy I wasn’t sedated.
And a fringe benefit is that I could drive myself home, and play board games with a friend the rest of the day.
No meds, and you didn’t find it that uncomfortable? Wow! Either you are made of steel, or we had surgeons with very different techniques. I think next time I want your doc.
My recent colonoscopy used a cocktail of versed (4mg IV) and fentanyl (250mcg IV). I was awake and watching everything on the monitor, but it felt like a nice warm hug from god. I could get used to that.
Sounds like me. I don’t think any of my path reports said “high grade displasia” but I do grow the sessile sort - which are likelier to be a problem. Scope #1 was summer of 2010. Doc said “come back in 1 to 2 years”. #2 was January 2012 - and I had one large enough (may have been 3 cm?) that he did not believe he got it all. A followup in May, then in November, got me back to a 1 year schedule.
I was on a 3 year schedule, but last year’s had one > 2 cm, so I’m back to every 2 years now.
They’re not fun, but they sure beat the alternative. My place gives Milk of Amnesia (propofol) versus Versed / fentanyl. Burns like a mofo when they inject it (because they don’t inject the local anesthesia THEN the propofol, they mix the two). Then there is about 3 seconds of entertaining “room is tilting then going away”, and the next thing I know I’m in a recovery area.
I won’t do it without, because a) what if it really IS painful, b) the whole thing seems unpleasant, and c) it’s the only time I ever get entertaining drugs, never having gotten into the habit of recreational pharmaceuticals. Those 3 seconds are my reward for having a jet-propelled ass the night before.
Huh. I thought gerbils were more traditional? /d&r
I didn’t get those the seconds, the time i did propofol. Instead, i woke up with a profound sense of having been violated. It was an upper GI, not a colonoscopy. And they are pretty physically violating. And because of the drugs i couldn’t consent. And i had PTSD for weeks, and woke up every night feeling violated, and couldn’t get back to sleep.
I’ll take the 5 minutes of discomfort, discomfort that i remember consenting to, thanks.
You two are right, I really muddled my thinking on this one; sorry about that.
As it turns out, 66% of positives being false positives still seems wrong to me, but in the other direction now that I think about it.
The lifetime risk of developing colon cancer is about 4%. Cologuard tests are supposed to be administered once every three years (compared to one colonoscopy every ten years). If a person lives to be 80, they’d go through about ten Cologuard tests; a hundred people would go through 1000 tests, and with four out of a hundred people developing colon cancer at some point in their lives, we’d expect about four of those 1000 tests to be true positives. The remaining 996 tests should be true negatives, but 13% of them, or 129, will be false positives.
So out of a thousand Cologuard tests, we’d expect about 133 positives, with the vast majority of them (129/133 = 97%), being false positives.
In fact, it’s probably worse than that. Cologuard is not recommended for people who are at high risk of colon cancer. This means the pool of people who are taking the Cologuard test have a less-than-4% chance of developing colon cancer, so the 129 false positives will be an even greater percentage of all positives.
It is still accurate to say that the false positives waste time and money. OTOH, if patients who shies away from colonoscopy on the first pass are willing to use Cologuard, then more people are being screened, and it’s probably a win for public health in general and for those patients in particular; some will get annoying false-positives that convince them to get colonoscopies that turn out negative, but some of them will get true-positives that otherwise would have killed them.
Are the people who develop polyps that are removed before they become cancerous included in the 4% lifetime risk of cancer? Because those are in some sense true positives despite not yet having cancer. Those are people who need medical treatment for their pre-cancerous condition.
I was out like a light. I remember the anesthesiologist injecting some milky-looking goo from a syringe into my IV tube, next thing I know, I’m in the recovery room.
Funny story: my first memory from coming out of anesthesia was two nurses (or techs or whatever) repeatedly saying my name with urgency. “Aaron! Aaron! Mr. XXXXX!” At first I thought they were just trying to wake me up, but then I became aware that I was coughing up a storm, and someone was pushing a rescue inhaler into my hand. A couple blasts later I was fine.
Indeed - and this is the reason I’ll never have first-hand knowledge of how to use a ColoGuard kit. I get to go directly to the gold standard, colonoscopy.
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see what results I got with such a test.
I’m much the same, except I do have the pain on injection, and the 2-3 seconds of tilting. On one visit, I have a vague memory of “something happening” midway through. Didn’t process what was going on, and I was almost immediately completely unconscious. Dunno if I reacted and got a top-off dose, or what. I mentioned that, next time around, and I think they gave me a little extra.
The funniest “coming awake” was the time when the first thing I heard was a nurse saying “I can’t get a blood pressure reading” (this was in the recovery area) and I announced “I’m not dead, I swear it!”.