Hooray for the colonoscopy!

I know. You're thinking, how can you cheer about getting five feet of tubing shoved up your bum? Do you get that much satisfaction out of doing the recommended over-age-50 check and finding out you don't have cancer? Well, no. Hardly.


You've heard how colonoscopies work. The day before, a liquid diet. In late afternoon, you start drinking a horrifically noxious drink, a brew of propylene glycol and sodium and saccharine, which brings on bowel explosions that rival rocket launches in their intensity. Boom! Go back to your book, turn the page, and BOOM! For hours, and more hours. The next morning, continue with four more glasses of the gaggalacious drink, many more trips to the bathroom, all of which left my colon in a state of pristine cleanliness.


Yes, of course, it's comedy gold, but Dave Barry already worked the territory so I'll just link him and get on with my story. 


So the process of the clean-out is nasty and uncomfortable. My anus felt like raw hamburger by the time I was done. As will Uranus. (sorry. so hard to find self-control.) It's not easy drinking so much horrible-tasting stuff without throwing up -- and I had it easy since my doc prescribed Half-Lytely, which is only half as many glasses to get down.


But. An unexpected thing happened. Late that night, after not eating all day and all the endless explosions, I noticed that I felt, actually, kind of good. Not all shaky from not eating, not fragile, not even dreading the procedure the next day. And in the morning, through the final stages of prep and going to the hospital, I was not anxious. I was, strangely, practically devil-may-care. Compared to how I was doing only the day before, facing a painless no-big-deal MRI, I was a different person.


I filled out the forms without feeling like it hurt my brain to remember my phone number. I joked with the nurses. The moment of the five-feet-into-the-bum was fast approaching, and still, I felt no worry in the least, confident that whatever happened, I could handle it.


I had been negotiating with my GI doc so as not to be given Versed, a drug I loathe. Don't need any extra memory problems, thank you, and I wanted to be awake to see unfolding events on the monitor, hear what the doc had to say, and admittedly, coast serenely on fentanyl. When she came in to see me just beforehand, the doc tried to tell me that just a little Versed would be OK, that most patients want the sedation because -- 


I interrupted her. I'm not scared, I said. At all. She looked at me curiously. "I see you're not," she said, surprised. "The woman before you was in tears at this stage."


I told her I actually felt better than I had in a long time, and she said that other patients had said the same.  


The reason, I have no doubt, is that the nuclear clean-out accomplishes what all the probiotics and antifungals and herbals I've been taking have not been able to --  the multiple bacterial infections in my gut were gotten rid of in a matter of hours. And the result is a dramatically clearer head, no anxiety, and an utterly different placement in the world. And just to be clear, this was before the fentanyl! 


The rest of the procedure went swimmingly. I was given an IV and heart monitors, wheeled into a high-tech room and hooked up to a blood pressure monitor, and got my first hit of fentanyl. In a few minutes I felt a little cramp and thought uh-oh! But the doc said she was already around the first turn -- and I hadn't even realized she'd begun. Apparently my colon is twisty and turny, like many women's, so there were some painful moments as she negotiated the turns, but she ordered more fentanyl and asked the nurse to press hard on my abdomen to stabilize my colon and those things helped a lot. 


I got to see my appendix, the entrance to the small intestine called the cecum, and the amazing tube -- so minty fresh! -- that is my colon. She painlessly snipped a few polyps that did not look dire, and that was that. Less than half an hour altogether. They pump you full of air to make room for the colonoscope, so afterwards you rip some epic farts which makes being wheeled down hospital corridors more amusing than usual.


So if you've got bacterial infections -- and if you've got brain fog, fatigue, or anxiety that's a distinct possibility -- look forward to your first colonoscopy.  You may feel tremendously better afterwards. I'm eating probiotics like mad, trying to get the good guys settled in before the bad guys have a chance to come back. If this effect lasts long at all, even the horrible drink will have been worth it. The public farting, the multiple sticks looking for a vein in my dehydrated arm, the Three-Mile-Island evacuations -- all worth it. I almost feel like myself again.