I think people focus a lot on the prep, so I’ll share my experience:
The prep procedure for me was mostly a non-event. The laxative prescribed for me was Moviprep. I had to drink two half-gallons of the *mixture over a period of two hours. It had a salty/citrussy flavor. Actually not bad as medicinal things go.
The purge process was so mild in my case that my biggest, uh, “issue” was that I was afraid to go to bed that night. I just knew it had to get worse, and that if I just went to sleep, I might have an accident in bed. But no. I’ve had diarrhea from food poisoning a number of times in my life, and that was about what I was expecting. Much, much easier.
I don’t remember the post-procedure flatulence, either. But, then, I was pretty loopy, and don’t remember a lot.
*Two doses of two packets of some kind of Kool-Aid type mixture, each dose to be dissolved in a half gallon of water.
The prep is awkward, but not terrible. You start cutting out certain foods and end up with nothing but clear liquids (not red) the day before the colonoscopy. I found some organic low-salt chicken broth that’s great for it, since it’s a change from sweet things like Jell-O.
You start taking the laxative. I used Moviprep – but make sure it’s chilled down; otherwise the flavor makes it hard to finish up. You get feeling pretty bloated with all that liquid, but the trips to the toilet aren’t bad. It’s not like you’re rushing madly to get there in time, but when you do go, a lot of water exits the system.
The actual operation – well, in my case I was out in about a minute and the next thing I knew I was in recovery.
Mamma Zappa, do you recall if you were on a low/no fiber diet for your FIRST colonoscopy, or just the subsequent ones? I ask because I’ve not yet run into low/no fiber regimens recommended for routine screening colonoscopies, and wonder if it was specific to them already knowing you had precancerous polyps or something.
If you’re tender skinned, consider a squirt bottle of saline instead of toilet paper or even wet wipes. Just like women use after childbirth. 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp of baking soda in 16 ounces warm-not-hot tap water will give you a concentration your skin and mucus membranes will appreciate. All you’re really trying to do after the first couple of poops is to rinse off the digestive juices so they don’t start digesting your butt. There won’t be any thick sticky stool sticking to you needing to be wiped away.
Tips for the gallon of yuck:
Chill a gallon of water, and then pour the chilled water into your jug of powder when you’re ready to mix it. Prechilled is good, but read your label - it can’t be mixed too far ahead of time.
Keep it in the fridge. Chilled is good.
Pour it over ice. Chilled is good.
Use a big honking straw - the kind some fast food places use for their thick shakes, or even better - bubble tea straws. Big straw means faster slurp, and straw means less taste on your tongue.
If you throw up, don’t worry about it. Just rinse your mouth out and go drink some more of the yucky stuff. I’d say about 1/4 of the people I work with throw up at some point.
When you start to poop absolutely clear liquid, you’re basically done. But don’t tell your doctor I said so. Clear clear, though. Not clear with flecks or lightish brown liquid. No cheating!
And despite all these tips making it sound like worse than an invasion of a small Asian country, try to relax. It really isn’t all that bad, and it’s a hell of a lot easier and more pleasant than managing a colostomy from colon cancer!
Someone mentioned not having the morning appointment, which I had. After I learned that I had to get up at 4 am for part two of the purge, I wasn’t real happy. In reality, my body and mind were so screwed up that I was awake at 4 am anyway.
For the first one, the upper GI was the main target and the lower one was really sort of a “while we’re at it”. In fact I was the one who suggested it. The others were followup.
I think my doctor tends to be overconservative. For example, nobody else I know of has “no blue or purple”, just “no red or orange” food color restrictions. And for the first procedure, I was actually told no solid foods for two days. Not sure why. The other ones - where they were expecting to find things, the restrictions were less.
I think (but am speculating, I don’t think I read this anywhere) that the less residue you have before you start, the faster the prep will go.
And the preferences vary WIDELY among practices, which is annoying; there should be some gold standard out there.
I remember a Doper who posted about this, who wasn’t told to do anything differently or even prep at home at all - he just showed up, and they did the prep right there. That one was weird.
FWIW: if you’re prescribed a two-stage prep (half the night before, half the day of), studies seem to show that that gives better results than doing it all the night before.
I had a fairly easy prep. No special diet. I skipped supper that night. They gave me these huge pills to take. I think it was 4 or 6 pills at one time? Lots of water. Then a few hours later another batch of pills and a pitcher of water.
They cleaned me out. Never imagined a person had that much in them.
The exam itself was nothing. I was heavily sedated. I went home and watched tv afterward.
I never went all the way out. I just got very mellow. In fact, I was too mellow to laugh when, as I was wheeled into a recovery line of gurneys, the nurse told me that I had to pass air soon and not to worry or be embarrassed “because it’s the doctor’s air.” The idea of passing someone else’s air amused me terribly, but I didn’t have enough focus to laugh.
I was still very mellow when my son and DIL drove me home. I told them about watching the whole thing on video. Apparently I said “pink and smooth as a baby’s bottom” more times than a completely awake woman would have.
tdn, you will only have a secondary concern if they find polyps while they’re in there. At least I’m assuming that your plumber has gotten your pre-consent to cauterize polyps as found. Most don’t want to wake you up and reschedule to go back in when they’re right there, in front of the camera and ready to burn. If you have no polyps, there should be no concerns.
This time mine is Dulcolax and Miralax the day before with a liquid diet. No red liquids, of course. I really couldn’t stand that citrus stuff I had to drink one of the other times; it seemed to have an oily quality that made it hard to get down. My biggest problem is getting my blood pressure high enough so they will let me go home. It runs really low, and must get lower while I am out, I guess. Maybe they’ll give me some chips in recovery. One of my doctors once told me I was the only patient he ever told to go out and eat potato chips.
BIG QFT! And that is the only thing I remember from my last exam. You will be a farting machine. Own it and be proud!
Yes, you will need a ride home. Apparently, I fell out of the wheelchair when leaving the hospital, and I called my boss with (I guess) hilarious reports that had me placed on speaker phone for the enjoyment of the entire office. They’re all bitches and I love them, so I wasn’t the least bit offended.
I did my Miralax prep with Crystal Light Lemonade, and it wasn’t that bad. Just set your laptop up in the bathroom and prepare to stay there for a while.
Well, the OP asked for it, and we are all grown ups now, so here goes:
My last colonoscopy was six months ago. During the procedure, they put a four inch tear in my colon. It took 28 hours to diagnose this, by which time I had a raging case of peritonitis and my survival odds were down to 72% (not so bad, but nowhere near what I am used to). They hustled me into surgery, with warnings I might wake up with a colostomy and it might be permanent.
I woke up a few hours later, with no colostomy, but with an eight inch scar on my midline and four hoses coming out of me. I spent a week in the hospital and a few more weeks recuperating at home. The doctor who did the original colostomy no longer calls every day, no longer brings me newspapers, no longer offers me his stethoscope to play with; that’s OK, he did for long enough.
Now everything seems fine, except I have to wonder if I will frighten small children on the beach come June.
I’ll be the outlier here and say that I found the chilled stuff (I believe mine was the whimsically named “GoLitely”) far more difficult to get down than when it had warmed to room temp.
I needed someone to pick me up afterwards, you do feel fairly light headed and should not drive. Other than that I fasted for whatever time from the day before … actually my last day of a holiday while my friends scarfed down French pastries grrr.
I had one three years ago after getting my appendix out (mainly because they didn’t know why it had to come out, just that it was giving me a lot of trouble one day).
I had the Moviprep, ate only a little the day before starting that. I had to mix the prep powder into 2 litres of water and then drink 250ml every 15 min over 2 hours. The first litre wasn’t that bad, though the stuff tasted like sea water with a hint of lemon. The second litre wasn’t a lot of fun, I nearly puked with the last few glasses.
It took a few hours to start working but I didn’t find it awful (keeping in mind I’d had Dehli Belly in India a few years before to use as a baseline for intestinal misery).
When I woke up I was given a drink and a sandwich and told to fart as much as I wanted (bliss!). Even funnier, in the bed next to me was my boss from one of my first jobs, so we spent a cheery 15 or 20 minutes catching up over a nice cup of tea and flatulence.
My doc has been on my case to get a colonoscopy for a while now, and I even had one scheduled until I chickened out and canceled it.
I have one really specific anxiety about the procedure that’s only been lightly touched upon in this thread and all the other colonoscopy threads over the last year or two. (Yes, I’ve read them all.)
And that is, specifically: Is the prep painful? That is, is there abdominal cramping or similar torment?
I can deal with the sense of bloating from drinking the 50 gallons of glop, and sitting on the crapper for 40 days and 40 nights, and all that, and maybe even the slimy pond scum flavor. But I’m seeing a lot of shit-serious horror stories around on the tubes regarding the gut-wrenching belly-ripping cramps that some people have. Is this really a thing?
Some background: I had a sigmoidoscopy about 5 years ago. The prep for that was no sweat at all. But they had patients chugging several gallons of phospho-soda solution in those days, which isn’t at all the same sort of swill they use today. It’s not even available any more – apparently some small number of patients got this little adverse reaction of major kidney failure. :eek:
My preps haven’t been painful. They’ve been very inconvenient, and the urges are usually quite sudden, but not painful at all. I definitely got tummy rumbles, but I didn’t experience any pain.
And do wear sweat pants or yoga pants, something that will come down easily.
Here’s one thing I find odd about having to pass gas before I leave. Seriously? In a building full of medical professionals, they can’t find one person to pull my finger? They must be understaffed.
That’s the plan. Pre-prep on Saturday, what with buying adult diapers, an enema, and enough laxatives to purge Kim Jong Un from power. Sunday will be a shitty L&O marathon.
Cramps: Nope - I’ve never had any special gut-cramping when I’ve done a prep. I mean, you’ll feel rumbling and a little “gotta go” clenching, but nothing at all like when I’ve had real diarrhea.
For what it’s worth: I think you may still be able to get the phospho-soda (could be wrong) but the volume wasn’t gallons by any means - I gather it was something like a 12 ounce bottle. Then of course you had to drink a lot of other beverages to provide the needed fluids… OsmoPrep is the same chemical, in a pill form (and egad those would choke a horse, and you have to take 4 of them at once, and they taste salty). The black-box warning is indeed for kidney issues, phosphate nephropathy, which I guess usually reverses itself but might not :(. My doc says that given that I’m otherwise in adequate health, I just need to make sure I get plenty of liquids.
I have yet to experience this apparently-new pre-exam fiber diet (may be yet in my future, lucky me, with a raging case of ongoing colitis), but I do highly recommend to those of you doing the GoLytely prep, put it in the fridge till it’s very cold, then cut it with ice-cold **white **grape juice.
Works a treat and you don’t taste the GoLytely at all. The trick is to get both liquids very, very cold. I’ve never had a problem getting it down since I started using the grape juice.
Clear clear, though. Not clear with flecks or lightish brown liquid. No cheating!
