What was your colonoscopy recovery like?

In My Humble Opinion
41

If you have a shower with a hand wand, just dispense with most wiping altogether. Poop, one swipe with TP to get any big chunks, then hop in the adjacent shower & spray your nether regions until clean. Hop out, dry off, pull your gym shorts back on, and settle back into your chair to post a play-by-play on the Dope and await the next round of squirts.

It’s also helpful to start the prep a bit earlier than they say. A night where you’re done before you’re falling asleep is much nicer than one where your innards are still waking you up in the wee hours.

42

For the love of all you hold dear, please don’t do this. Maybe just PM it all to LSLGuy.

43

If you do it, give it a clear title, so those who want to avoid it can. I might follow along and give you encouragement. :laughing:

44

It seems there’s different kinds of prep these days, and how bad it is depends a lot on which one they give you. The older version apparently sucks, but mine was actually pretty trivial.

Recovery afterwards was weird. At the time, I felt fine, but a while later, my sister, who drove me home, posted a picture of me leaving the hospital. I’m clearly posing for a photo, but I had no memory of doing that! Apparently I was quite out of it at some points, so I’d take the warnings about driving and making important decisions seriously.

45

Some of the drugs interfere with the ability to form memories. And the effect can linger for a while after they send you home.

46

I haven’t read the thread but can tell my own experience: I got sedated and was unconscious for the whole procedure and awoke when they wheeled me to a special recovery room. I had no pain at all and felt normal, but I was very hungry. But fortunately, that was cared for by the hospital because I could order some sandwiches and coffee while recovering. After about an hour, I could leave and felt no aftereffects whatsoever. The prep though was horrible.

47

It’s obviously very different for different people , but the above has never been my experience. With the liquid preps, I felt nauseated every time I drank some. (Which is why I get the tablets now)

And this

would never have worked for me with the liquid prep . By the time I got out of the shower, it would be time for more prep and then right back on the toilet.

As far as recovery goes, I was hungry , gassy and drowsy but that was it.

48

My experience is like @LSLGuy’s. I thought the taste of the drug was weirdly repulsive and a little nauseating, so i used a long plastic straw to carry it most of the way past my tongue, so i barely tasted it. I’m not sure i could have gotten the liquid down without the straw, but with the straw it was easy. And the, um, output is copious, but unlike the kind of diarrhea you get when you are sick, it was painless. The only issue, as others have noted, is the risk of irritating the anus by wiping.

My doctor instructed me to dilute the drug in a mixture of sugar and sugar-free Gatorade, because he wanted me to have fairly normal blood sugar levels during the evening and for the exam. I fast routinely for Yom Kippur, (and was doing regular intermittent fasting the last time i had a colonoscopy) so my body has learned to handle missing meals without anything going awry. But it was thoughtful of him, and probably leads to better outcomes overall.

49

Nope! the prep is absolutely nothing to worry about. Actually, it is kind of fun–because you get a whole day free, dedicated purely for yourself.

Here’s how it goes.
You mix the magic power in a little glass of water. It tastes funny–a bit like grapefruit juice–but it’s easy to swallow.
Then, a half hour later, you take a nice, normal shit. Then, a half hour later, another shit–but a little less nice.

Then you start drinking. (Prepare an old two-liter bottle of soda, fill it with water, and make sure you drink it all over the course of the day.)
The water flows thru your body, and of course, out the other end. But that’s all it is–water. No gas, no pain, no stomach cramps, none of the unpleasant feelings that you expect when you have diarrhea

The water flows out every half hour or so, so you do spend a lot of time on the toilet…but it is not painful. And there is none of that familiar “emergency” feeling–you don’t have sudden pains and you don’t have to make a desperate dash to the bathroom.

It feels basically like peeing…except the water is coming out of the wrong orifice.

This goes on for about half a day. You should watch the color of the liquid each time. It gets progressively clearer. It still has an ugly yellowish-brownish color, but the lighter the color the better.

Drink a LOT of water–you have to flush out your pipes. If you don’t drink enough, you may see a darker brown color, which means that your guts are still lined with shit, and the doctor shoving the camera up your butt won’t be able to see your gut walls,… so you’ll have to do the whole exam all over again.

So–why did I say this is FUN? Because it is!
You own your whole life for the day.
You get kind of light-headed from having no food in your body. You might feel a bit dizzy. So you warn everybody on the planet in advance–on that day, you are not available for any work or any serious conversation, or any serious decisions of any kind.

You can proudly spend the entire day vegging out in front of the TV watching mindless drivel, or on youtube watching two million cat videos. No phone calls from work, no looking a bank accounts, no worrying about when you’ll have time to take the car for repairs, no arguing with the spouse about whose going to pick up the kids tomorrow. In short–you do absolutely no thinking. You get to be a child again, for an entire day. Enjoy it!

And then you get driven to the clinic, you lay down on the table…and seemingly 60 seconds later you wake up in a different room. You never knew that somebody just stuck two miles of rubber tube up your butt.

And then–more fun!!! You wake up groggy, but feeling good. You get taken home, and the grogginess wears off,…and suddenly you realize that you have had no calories in your body for the past day and a half, and you are hungry. So you eat like a pig—remember, you’re a child today!!!You get to eat whatever you want…all the chocolate you can eat, two donuts, and then some ice cream. Your body wants calories, and fast, so it all tastes good. So you get to act like a kid opening his bag of loot on Halloween, and don’t have to feel guilty.

It’s all over in a day. And then you have to go back to being a grownup again.
So enjoy the day while it lasts!

And if you haven’t read this classic piece by comedian Dave Barry…do so now. It’s a funny but serious tale that will make you feel good about getting your butt examined.
https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article1928847.html

50

Agree completely with this take.^^

The many pluses definitely outweigh the minor minuses.

51

I’ve had two colonoscopies (routine), both without anesthesia. I have a dislike of being “put under” and some types of anesthesia make me nauseous. Both times the procedure involved minor discomfort - about the same as having gas cramps. It was interesting to be able to see what the doctor saw on the big monitor on the wall.

52

Thanks for the responses, everyone! I’m feeling reassured both about the prep and the recovery.

53

That was my experience; pissing out of my ass.

54

Oh man, I remember waking up in the recovery room. The nurse asked me how I was doing. I said that I was just taking a great nap and then fell back asleep. It is the nap of the gods! Once I woke up for good, I was fine. I had no issues at all. The actual procedure is nothing - easy peasy. It was the prep that took me out. I could barely choke down that vile concoction. Even the pooping wasn’t bad at all.

55

Yeah, that was the main issue for me, chugging down liters and liters of that ghastly liquid. The pooping I could stand, I have IBS and sometimes similar toilet frequencies on normal days.

But my last colonoscopy was 10 years ago, and I have heard that there are modern products that are easier to take. Can someone confirm this?

56

For both of mine it wasn’t something I’d voluntarily drink,but I didn’t find either of it to be particularly vile, just salty and citrusy. YMMV.

57

It was a real pain in the butt!

Sorry, someone had to make that joke (sorry if I missed it above).

I’ve had one and the recovery was easy. Much better than the two surgeries I’ve had. Also, nothing found so good news: Don’t have to drink the gallon of slime for another 10 years.

58

Mine was salty and citrusy too, but on top of that overly sweet and slimy. I still vividly remember the taste although it was 10 years ago.

59

Hmm. I was told to buy a gallon or so of my favorite non-carbonated electrolyte beverage and mix X amount of a white laxative powder into it. The resulting concoction had the same taste & consistency as the unadulterated Gatorade. Not difficult to drink at all.

There were also some pills first to get the landslide mudslide started, but swallowing pills is easy too.

I vaguely recall my very first time ~15 years ago was rather more involved. A premade enema and some mildly off-putting liquids.

Evidently the drug regimen is getting better and there’s still lots of local variation in how any given clinic wants the prep performed.

60

Mine was either a powder or a gel, I don’t remember exactly, but you mixed it with plain water.