Let’s today start with the end: Everything’s fine. No concerns or additional needs to undergo the procedure again.
I wanted to get that out of the way right up front because the end is a good place to start when you’re talking about the cringe-inducing indignities of what I’ll euphemistically call “the procedure.”
It’s recommended for every man or woman once their odometer hits 50. It can by then detect a deadly cancer and render it treatable. Having it done is worth the embarrassment. I’m 54 and had put it off for as long as I could.
Bottom line: It was time to get this procedure behind me.
Honest, I wasn’t even going to write about it. I don’t feel comfortable writing about things I’d rather not even talk about.
However, a buddy of mine noticed a telltale IV bandage on my right hand, is privy to my circumstances and cunningly knew right away what the procedure had to be: “Oh, man, you have to blog about it,” he said. “People need to hear it and it’s bound to be funny. C’mon! You have to!”
So consider this a sort of public service announcement and, yeah, a good chance to share lots and lots of puns about my buns: We’re talking buttloads.
You’ve probably heard the prep is the worst. That’s true. The infernal cleansing solution seems to be composed of Satan’s pit perspiration. It’s awful.
Now, I’ve drunk many awful mostly alcoholic concoctions on dares of drunken friends. I can drink anything; you probably can, too.
But there’s just so much of the solution: 3 liters — and you know it must be bad if they measure it in metric. It’s every 15 to 30 minutes another slug. That goes on for about four hours; again doable if only you knew it was going to bestow a giddy buzz.
But the end results are results in the end. You’re tethered to the toilet; so many indignities.
Then there’s this. No food for about 36 hours before the procedure. You’re home where all you do is eat. Yet you cannot. You’re starving. It occurred to me that a sad percentage of the world’s population daily endures under those exact conditions; I felt shame.
It didn’t matter. I felt resentful that I couldn’t snag a Pringle whenever I felt like it.
And, yeah, you worry the proctologist is going to at the end of the procedure say he’s found a tumor. You secretly wonder if this is what the anal prospector is hoping he’ll find. It is, after all, what he went to school for. It’s his metaphorical bread ’n’ BUTTer.
So you have that hanging over your head.
Val drove me to the Latrobe hospital at 8 a.m. and then departed to put Lucy on the bus and do her thing. She’d return at 10 a.m.
They had me naked in a jiffy and the anesthesiologist began her quizzing about allergies, medications, history, etc.; no, no, no, etc. Then it was a long naked wait. I’m very impatient when I’m naked, wanting to either sleep, screw or just get dressed. I was there for at least 30 minutes. What the hell was taking so long?
I wanted them to get off their asses and into mine.
Finally, they wheeled me into the exam room, applied the gas and did their thing.
Or so they said.
They might have played cards or spent 20 minutes commenting on their hangovers or my genitals, which I suspect they do with every sedated patient.
There’s no evidence they did anything other than anesthetize me. Sure, they said I was fine and showed me pictures of what they said were my gastro-intestinal tract, but they could have been anyone’s; seen one, seen ‘em all.
If it was a ruse, I forgive them. I mean if you can’t turn the other cheek with your proctologist, who can you?
There; I think that went well. I used 11 versions of the grammatical colons and not one of the anatomical kind which was the whole subject of this essay.
And now I’m all done.
The End.
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