(Stock photo from a throne store)
I'm of that certain age when screening colonoscopies get recommended more often. I had my first one 11 years ago, so I'm due (overdue for a 10 year repeat, actually) and scheduling that has been a background thread of the last few months.
It was time to get more closely acquainted with this throne. Whether I wanted to or not.
It's not possible to do an article on getting a colonoscopy that's got a better tone than Dave Barry's 2008 classic (coincidentally almost exactly when I had my first one). It's all bathroom humor, after all, so who better than the self-deprecating author of "Boogers Are My Beat"?
This isn't the same doctor I went to in '08, but he also had a set of detailed instructions to follow, starting from five days out to the night before. Examples are like, "Day 5 don't eat anything with seeds: tomatoes, peppers, strawberries or anything similar"; "Day 3 no raw vegetables - no salad or cole slaw". All of this pales next to the day before. That's a "clear liquids only" diet that allows black coffee but not Coke or Root Beer. There's a prescription "prep solution" to buy and take with very specific instructions. "At 4:00 PM, pour the contents of bottle 1 into the mixing container, add cool water to fill it to 16 ounces, then drink it all. Over the course of the next five hours, you must have five 8 ounce glasses of clear liquid, at your own pace". The second dose, which must be done at 4:00 AM the day of, is just different enough to really mess you up.
I distinctly remember from my first one in '08 that it became my calibration for exactly how bad projectile diarrhea can be. If I ever got sick in the intervening 11 years, I'd think "was that as bad as the prep? Did I need to strap myself to the floor to keep from going airborne?" This one wasn't that violent. Through a marvel of modern chemistry, the prep solution draws water out of every tissue in your body and forcibly washes everything out of your intestines from the inside. I spent a lot of quality time with the throne from 1600 yesterday through about 2200. Then the alarm rang at 3:45 this morning for round two, from 0500 until we went to the hospital at 0830. If you don't drink that "five 8 ounce glasses of clear liquid", the prep would probably turn you into a giant prune-like figure still spurting water.
The experience is draining. After some lunch, I ended up napping a couple of hours, to get back some semblance of feeling normal. I don't think it's from the anesthesia, I think it's just being messed up by my hours on the throne.
I've got the tee-shirt for that, too.
ReplyDeleteI'm "overdue" also, but the Doc said it'd probably be my last one.
ReplyDeleteI looked at her and said "Give it to me straight, Doc. Am I that bad?", at which point she busted up and said I was fine, but they didn't to colonoscopies after age 70!
If they do them more frequently as we get older, at some point you're getting one all the time.
DeleteI expect I'll get the same talk.
In the 90's the prep solution was named 'Go Lightly' [I kid you not] and boy howdy that was a lie.
ReplyDeleteThe nickname for "Go Lightly" was "Step Lively"!
DeleteThe prep for yours sounds less pleasant than mine was!
ReplyDeleteThe doc told me beforehand that the prep would make me "poop like a superstar" and he was right.
His prep was all over the counter stuff from CVS, some pill thing and some powder laxative. When I read his instructions for the laxative and compared it to what was on the box, I realized he was telling me to take almost two weeks of it in one afternoon. On the plus side, his version of the prep worked the day before and he said nothing by mouth after midnight. That's better than the getting up at 4am to take more like your guy said.
I guess the only other time in your life that you're as emptied out as that is when you're borne. It's freaky to poo yet more water at the end of the prep and it comes out watery with some yellow in it which is bile from your liver. At that point that's the only thing left in your guy other than water. Normally you can't see it due to everything else that normally is in there.
For many readers this might be TMI, but I understand.
DeleteIn the evening (Wednesday) I was thinking if they're really going to see the colon walls, this stuff coming out had better be water clear and it wasn't. I was wondering what they do to be able to see: spray water in there and suction it out? After the second round in the morning, it was clear with a yellow tint from the bile, as you say.
That continued well after the procedure into last night, which was a little unexpected.
For me, the prep wasn't all that different from my normal life. There's a reason I'm on disability retirement, I guess. :(
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ReplyDeleteYeah, the experience is a pain. In the you know where ...
ReplyDeleteOh, thank dog, finally, an upside to being older! Yay!
ReplyDeleteAbout 15 years ago, they tried to run the short length exam on me. Lots of struggling on their part with what appeared to be a toilet snake, complete with armored cable, but they coudn't get it around a bend, and finally gave up. End of the day, I was the last patient. Told me they would schedule the full length exam a week later. The company's state contract ended a couple days later, and I couldn't get accepted on the commercial side, so no health coverage to complete the testing.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found out afterwards was that the risks inherent in these procedures were more dangerous than waiting for symptoms of a problem to show up. Notable percentage of perforated bowels, which would necessitate emergency surgery to correct, and some deaths involved. There is a reason that they only schedule these tests during the daytime hours.
But, they are good, steady money for the hospitals and staff, so they push them.
IIRC, it was a one day prep, and they were complimentary on how clean my guts were. I was seeing it on a screen in real time, which was somewhat entertaining. My first occasion to view inside a body was spectating at a surgery employing a CO2 surgical laser I helped design. THAT was a very satisfying situation for me.
My first occasion to view inside a body was spectating at a surgery employing a CO2 surgical laser I helped design. THAT was a very satisfying situation for me. That would be a pretty cool moment!
DeleteI did some reading beforehand and the usual number they quote is about 0.4% "complications", which is 4 people out of every thousand. The real question there is always the risk of something bad from not doing it vs the risk from doing it. I mean, you'd sure buy a lottery ticket for a million dollar payout if it was 0.4% vs 1 in 15 million chance. It comes down to what the risks of not detecting things is.
I've read several times and places that the success rate in curing cancers hasn't really changed much in the last 50 years. What has saved the most people is earlier detection.