Colon cancer screening guidelines suggest EITHER a colonoscopy every ten years unless you have results suggesting a different schedule, or a home test yearly, currently called a FIT, where you send in a card with one sample. I do them yearly, as recommended by CDC and everyone else’s guidelines. I’m really excited by the concept of the DNA test screening, BTW. BINGO!
And Charlie, I’m a health care provider. BITD an anesthesiologist and I in an ICU were coding a man who as having a cardiac event. The Doc said "Here we are again, saving lives and stamping out disease ". He was being sarcastic but I’ve never forgotten the phrase. Thanks, Donatelli, for that and for saying the best place to learn a foreign language was beween the sheets
Wow, my doctor wouldn’t go for that. My husband had to take a full unpaid day off of work to provide transportation.
To anyone who is interested, here’s a link to the website of the company developing the polyp/DNA test kit. The “advisory panel approval” they’re discussing is not the full FDA approval, but a very positive indication that such is forthcoming. Fingers crossed!
The first appointment that was made for me was at a clinic an hour away from my house - and we would have had to drive over there in rush hour traffic.
Oh. Hell. No.
I ended up changing it to a different clinic about 20 minutes away.
Uh-oh. Guess I’d better call them and find out what their policy is. I do not have anyone who can do this.
Or rather, I did, but then our brand-new owner axed telecommuting and now I don’t, because I cannot ask my friend to burn a half-day or full day’s vacation on this. :mad:
Boy, you weren’t kidding, Telemark. They will NOT put me in cab to go home unless there’s someone besides the driver with me, which returns me to my original problem. And I can’t stay until I’m capable of driving because that’ll be 12 hours.
I wonder if I can talk them into a local instead of a general anesthetic.
Oh, yes, and may the biting fleas of a thousand thousand camels set up housekeeping in perpetuity in the new CEO’s nether regions for his ban on telecommuting.
There are people out there with some pretty scary stories of what they said or did on the ride home so be sure you are with someone you trust. Example story: A friend propositioned a coworker who had agreed to drive him. Coworker refused to talk to him for weeks afterward.
The general anesthetic didn’t seem to affect me at all but I still followed instructions. I wonder who I can coerce into being my driver when the next one comes around.
They really won’t let you call a cab or try to fake them out on your ride. Sometimes they insist on meeting your ride in person and they may even make them sit there while the procedure is being done so they know you won’t pull a bait and switch on them. It is a liability thing.
However, I didn’t hear that part when I had one done. I showed up without a ride and they told me I needed to reschedule. I told them that wasn’t happening. They made the off-hand and sarcastic offer of doing the procedure without any anesthetic (there is no such thing as local anesthetic for a colonoscopy; the unpleasantness is mainly internal cramping over a large area). I took them up on the offer even though I don’t think they were serious initially. They consulted with the doctor and he agreed to do it because he had just worked with me in the hospital a few weeks before and knew that I could handle it. He said that he had never done one without anesthesia before but it is less uncommon in some other countries.
It wasn’t THAT bad but it was quite painful at times. The air that they use to expand the areas they need to look at causes some brief but very intense cramping sensations. It is the worst when they have to make sharp turns with the scope.
You might be able to talk your doctor into skipping the anesthetic if you are sure you can handle it. It requires a moderately high pain tolerance for short burst of pain but it isn’t like it is 45 minutes of constant hell. You don’t feel much most of the time and they tell you when the cramps are about to hit. When it is over, it is truly over and you can just stand up, drive home and go about the rest of your day without any lingering side effects of anesthesia.
It IS a pain in the ass that our medical establishment basically says to single people: Go jump in a lake.
I, likewise, had nobody to drive me to my procedure last year. I canceled it, but some months later events happened that suggested that a colonoscopy might be a really good idea. Eventually, I called by brother, who drove 3 hours each way to get to my place plus sitting in the waiting room throughout the procedure.
I did some asking-around after the fact about this.
Suggestion: Go to you local senior center. (There may be several agencies offering various services to seniors; so ask around; any one of them should, at least, be able to tell you of the existence of others.) Some of them offer services like transportation to/from medical appointments for seniors who don’t drive themselves. There might be a way to get volunteer help to drive you and sit there during the procedures. There may be churches that do things like this, provided by volunteers from their congregations. Or people who will volunteer on their own.
For all the shit-talking we do about “religious people” on these boards, there is another side too: Some “religious people” are, like Boy Scouts, into doing “good deeds”. Some years ago, when I had some other medical problems, my boss talked it around at her church, and I had several total strangers from their congregation waiting on me hand and foot for the next two weeks.
When I left the Koh Samui hospital after two nights there with pneumonia, I walked out with my backpack on my shoulder, down the street to the main drag, hopped on a passing taxi and took it to the beach. Simpler times.
By the next time we all need to have it done, it looks like the polyp-DNA detecting kit I discussed above will be available. Here’s an article discussing the participation of a Mayo Clinic doctor in its invention.
Just had my second colonoscopy. Woke up five minutes before they were done. He gave me more Versed, but nothing happened. It wasn’t that uncomfortable…a little gassy, aware they were still probing, but not horrible. Three doses of Versed in all. Better outcome this time than last, so one more in another 5 years and then if that one is good, I can go to ten years apart. I did not snigger when they told me that because I was under 60, I HAD to take a pregnancy test first. And I’m not gassy afters, which is nice.
Yeah…they just handed me a cup, said, “since you are a woman under sixty we need a pregnancy test…here ya go”. Wasn’t going to argue with her that I’m in menopause and haven’t had a opportunity to get pregnant for months anyhow…I needed to pee in any case! And I don’t remember that from last time, but I’m old…
What? for the trip home? Anything he was farting was ambient air from the clinic and shouldn’t have smelled bad.
If this was an issue for the trip there, fart aroma would have been the LEAST of your worries :D.
carnut, I know this is from a while back, but do you happen to know the name of the “two pills” you took? Just curious. As I posted earlier, the only pill prep in the US is a huge handful of pills a horse would say nay (hah) to.
Sodium picosulfate (Prepopik, I think, in the US; Pico-salax elsewhere) was my choice last time and while the taste was bad, it was a VERY small quantity of bad.
