Procedure: Part IV

What is phosphos soda, anyway? The night before my procedure I drank four shots of the bitter, salty stuff, at twenty-minute intervals, followed by 32-ounce water chasers. As bad as it was, the taste was not the worst of it. It wasn’t long before any remaining liquid from the past two days was decisively evacuated, and I wished that I’d stayed away from that spicy broth.

Now, watching on TV, I saw just how clean and empty my bowels were. Rippling with peristalsis, the walls of my colon glowed yellow, a fine network of greenish-blue veins visible below the surface. Dr. H narrated our progress as we went, stopping a few minutes in to pinch a little polyp with the forceps. He would send it to the lab for biopsy, but even if it was pre-cancerous, he assured me that it was of no concern. As the serrated teeth of the little alligator-like instrument chewed away at the tiny bump, it bled, bright red washing down the sides of the tunnel, but I couldn’t feel it; there are no nerves inside our intestines. We moved on, and in a moment reached a tight turn. “I’m going to blow some air here to straighten it out,” he told me, “you might feel a little pressure.”

Inflating your intestines turns out to be rather painful, which is why they invented beano and gas-x. I ground my teeth, willing my recalcitrant gut to unbend and let the colonoscopy continue. Finally it opened up like a lazy windsock in a light breeze, and the cramping disappeared. After that, it was a straight shot all the way to my appendix, which resembled Pinocchio’s nose. That was the end of the line, and, with the exception of that one little polyp, there was nothing. The trip out was much quicker, and a lot like watching a tape of what I’d just seen in rewind. One last quick view of my bare butt, and it was all over. “You did great,” Dr. H told me. “See you in three years.”

Back in my recovery cubicle, I got dressed. Yet another nurse was startled that I was all ready to go when she came in to check on me. Before I was discharged, she gave me a run down of what I might expect over the course of the day, “But don’t worry,” she assured me, “it’s fresh air.”