Colonoscopy - What's Not to Love?

Colonoscopy - the mere utterance of the word, for those that have had one, can bring about tense shoulders, a headache, and finding reasons to avoid it (much like jury duty or listening to political ads). For those that haven’t had one and have never been told what it is, well, it conjures pangs of fear and unknowing - like being called into the boss’s office for no reason when sales have been down.

What a colonoscopy does is find out the state of health of your colon.

Now the colon is a strange organ, and when you look at a medical diagram of it, it looks like it’s 75’ long and snakes through everywhere in your torso. Being such a long organ, it needs examination every too often, and how that is done is nothing like sticking out your butt and mouthing “AHHH” but by using a smaller probing gadget - up there - with a little camera and light on it, sort of like a tapeworm that wants to be a miner when it grows up.

Talk about getting to the bottom of things.

Now, the doctor who performs this procedure is called a proctologist. This is a guy (it seems like they are all guys) who said to himself one day, “I kind of would like to be a plumber, but I want to be a doctor, too!” It’s not a job with a lot of advancement; I mean, you start at the bottom—and you stay there.

They say the worst of the procedure of the preparation, in which you have to empty your colon of all possible…matter…so that when “up periscope” happens, he can see the bare colon in all it’s bareness, looking for polyps (I guess I could make a joke about Hershey’s Kisses here), and snipping them off like bad buds on a rose bush.

The Proctologist gives you a witch’s brew of a drink that comes in a 55-gallon drum, in which you empty into a chemical they use to clean the inside of cement trucks, then drink it down all at once.. Once you’ve done that task worthy of a college frat hazing, you dare not be farther than a few inches from a toilet because this brew does its thing, and right quick.

After a couple of hours of feeling like you’ve converted all the sins of the world into fecal matter, you’ll probably receive an angry banging on your front door from the foreman at your local sewage plant, wondering what’s going on exactly. You’ll feel much lighter, to be sure, and that time your friend said “You’re full of it!” you’ll realize just how right he was. Belts go in a few more notches, and your pants look baggy…even your shoes seem larger now.

Very early the next morning, while even roosters are still sleeping, you go into the doctor’s office and get ready for the big event. Some paperwork, then into the peek-a-boo gown, and off you go, kissing your loved one goodbye. They start the IV, wheel you into the procedure room, ask your name and all that verification stuff, and they say, “You’re here for a colonoscopy?” To which you reply, if you’re a smart ass like me, “No, I just had an earache.” The only funny part of that is seeing the doctor, and nurses don’t find it funny; this is serious stuff, putting a patient to sleep and snaking a camera up his bum until it almost comes out his mouth, and no jokes are allowed, mister!

Then they put the good stuff in the IV to put you to sleep…and you are done, waking up, not feeling any pain or discomfort down there, thank God. Seems like you’ve been out 1 minute. After a few minutes of coming to, they rush you the heck out of there, and your loved one drives you home, and you force them to stop somewhere for food, because you’re so hungry, you’ll soon eat your sock.

Several years later, you get the results of the good doctor’s examination, and hopefully, there is little or nothing to worry about. But at least it’s done, and you took care of this important procedure.