butt exam
July 3rd, 2007 by Lawrence David
my body is sorely confused — it must think i’ve joined AARP or something. last month, i’m struck by the bane of geriatrics: shingles. today, i underwent the universal rite of senior citizenhood — the colonoscopy (a fancy word for a butt exam).
you see, my quals weren’t the only test i took this summer. i also took a fecal occult blood test — and failed. i should have studied harder. in any case, my butt doctor thought it prudent that they go and inspect who spiked my punch.
—
the word “traumatic” doesn’t begin to describe how awful the whole ordeal was. i had the pleasure of:
- one night spent drinking a gallon of colyte and 10 ozs of magnesium citrate (advertised on the bottle as the “sparkling laxative.”) [when i asked the pharmacist who looked like mark paul gosselaar what the difference between the two was, he smiled and said, "the first one gets things going and the second one finishes you off." i know you might not want to have read that, but i feel like what i went through gives me at least the right to make other people squirm.]
- being assured by my physician (from behind his splatter-guard mask that covered him from neck to the crown of his head) that “i’d be heavily sedated,” only to burst out of semi-consciousness midway through the procedure in a paroxysm of abdominal pain. apparently, i’ve got an abnormally narrow colon and it didn’t appreciate 5 feet of tubing snaking its way through.
- being insanely disoriented and discombobulated after the exam. i barely recall my physician speaking with me before i was released. it seems that my sedatives were mixed into a cocktail with some valium-like drugs that have an amnesiac effect. [good lord, i got date-raped.]
still, i suppose the whole procedure was worthwhile — my gastroenterologist removed a “large” (his adjective, not mine) polyp from my GI tract. talk about bad meat. it’ll take a couple of days for a lab tech to biopsy my polyp. i tried to talk the doctor into letting me keep my polyp in a jar, but he ignored me and probably thought it was the drugs talking.
When i was 13 i asked for the tumor they removed from my neck. the nurses kind of brushed the question off, and when i woke up after the procedure, and asked again, they gave me this lame excuse about bio-hazards. But in the end, they did give me a slide of the biopsy to keep! you should ask for the slide of your pylop!