Monday riddles of life/colonoscopies

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Sorry to start your week off with a riddle, but what begins at the bottom, has 5 feet, and ends back at the beginning?

A Monday blog about your colonoscopy!

Haven’t had one?

Then someone somewhere soon is about to advise you it’s time.

It could save your life. The procedure can both detect and remove pre-cancerous polyps that kill 51,000 Americans a year. That’s a tragically high number for something that could be so easily preventable if only we all agreed to take some common sense precautions.

Of course, it’s only ballpark 10,000 more annual deaths than those 40,000 poor hapless bastards killed by all-American gun violence and no one wants to do squat about that so big whoop.

Speaking of squat, colonoscopy patients should be prepared to do lots of that. They make you drink a diabolical solution the day before to make your gastro-industrial tract clean as a whistle, albeit a whistle no sane person would ever wish to blow.

Why all this talk of colonoscopies when I had mine done, oh, about three years ago?

I recently had to take a loved one in for hers. Patients are highly medicated for 24 hours so now we know just what it takes to get me to be the designated driver. So I’m sitting there all sober and observant and I was struck by how factory-like this procedure has become.

There were maybe a dozen in the waiting room and one after another they just kept coming.

To further the proctological factory analogy, it was a real ASS-embly line.

Being there amidst so many anxious patients, had me recalling my own experience. What do I remember most? I remember thinking anti-drug crusader Nancy Reagan was wrong. Drugs aren’t bad.

Drugs are terrific! Who knew having 5-feet of apparatus surgically shoved up your rectum could involve so much euphoria?

I’ve since heard an unverified bar chatter that the drugs they use to put you out for the colonoscopy are the same ones King of Pop Michael Jackson OD’d on.

It seems all too convenient: a drug they give you before they shove something up your rear is misused by a man who …

The obvious punchlines are too lazy for even me.

I’m suspicious of the pictures they give you in post-op. They tell you it was taken deep inside your very own colon.

I hate to sound like some cracker colo-racist, but they all look exactly alike. Like I couldn’t believe it when they showed me pictures of what they said were my colon. It looked so ordinary

“This can’t be mine,” I protested. “My colon is much more handsome. And if this colon is mine then where’s the mustache?”

I once did a story for Esquire about what it’s like to be a proctologist. I wish I still had it because the doctor had a great self-deprecating sense of humor. He said his friends all called him “the Rear Admiral.”

He had a bunch of other fart jokes like that and said he goes to work each day knowing he’s saving lives.

I wonder about the many people working in the Excela Health Center on Donohoe Road where we’d been sent. Every single person, from receptionist to doctor, was cheerful and friendly. If anyone was feeling occupational burnout, they kept it concealed.

I’ve been in surlier ice cream shops.

Could it be seeing the full range of humanity so vulnerable, so exposed, makes one more appreciative of our common decency?

Could it be as simple as that? Could it be a 9-to-5 exposure to real assholes somehow bestows an understanding that deep down inside — deep up inside — there aren’t quite so many metaphorical ones.

Or maybe they’re just better at turning the other cheek. It’s a Biblical sentiment for most of us, but many of them had to pass a test on the maneuver back in med school.

And that’s as good a place as any to conclude an essay on colonoscopies.

The End.

Related …

Doc pays $500,000 for colonoscopy banter

(Just this one recommendation today. I do so to encourage you to read this one. It’s very funny.)

Mom's fallen & may not get back up

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I’ve been the primary care giver for my darling 84-year-old mother since 2010 when she first began exhibiting signs of mild dementia. In the last two weeks under my primary care, the old gal’s been diagnosed with lung cancer, pneumonia, severe dementia and osteoporosis after falling in her kitchen and shattering her left wrist.

I think I’ve finally found my calling.

Primary care giver? Murder Inc. has nothing on me.

Oh, that poor woman.

She’s since Sunday evening been in the ICU at Latrobe hospital. She’d spent the day on our porch sipping wine and complaining about needing a nap. I took her to her apartment, settled her into her chair and told her I’d see her Monday.

Unlike many dementia patients, she was still capable of living alone, albeit with our daily visits. She can make coffee, work the microwave and — hallelujah — take care of her intimate personal needs.

It was about 7 p.m. when the neighbor from the floor below heard her fall and called 911 and me.

From my understanding, her dementia is rare in that she’s become even more cheerful than she’s ever been — and she used to make Fred Rogers seem like a sourpuss.

I’ve often said she gave me my sense of humor, which means she gave me everything.

On what was to become her worst night since, I guess, a 1982 double mastectomy, she was joking about needing wine and telling the paramedics the pain was a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. If there was pain, it was not at all evident. No moaning. No grimace.

When they wheeled her stretcher past the ladies gathered on the porch outside, she responded to their questioned concerns with, “They’re taking me to the hospital. I’m having a baby!”

I wish I could say with certainty she was joking.

The pain didn’t ding an obvious 10 until two hours later when they gruesomely reset the bones. One doctor gently held her wrist, another her fingers, and together they began gingerly tugging in opposite directions. 

I remain surprised she muffled her screams. Had she not, I wonder if I’d have run like a coward out of the room. Instead, I stood at the end of the bed messaging her feet and feeling sure I’d failed her.

We spent the next seven hours in that room with me trying to patiently respond to her deliriums about the location of her purse, her need for Kleenex, why her arm was in an annoying sling and what all these friendly strangers were doing in her bedroom. Every 10 minutes I’d literally have to wrestle this 104-pound grandmother back into the bed to prevent her from getting up to undertake various missions.

It was all so much pain and absurdity.

I’ve read how some children say they felt God’s divine presence in the death room when a loved one passes. After Sunday, I wonder if the presence I’m destined to most feel will be that of the late Moe Howard.

A chest X-ray revealed a lung cancer and pneumonia. She’s rallied from her Sunday evening lows when the doctor described her status as precarious, but an experienced nurse described her as feisty. She pegged her term at six months.

She has a living will and we’re today looking at hospice options. We have maybe three days to decide.

I told an oncologist about how the sudden onslaught of deadly diagnosis made me feel like I’ve failed my mother. He said: “Did you think under your watch she was somehow going to become younger and healthier?”

I guess in these situations we’re all hardwired to feel like failures.

I remember after a round of petty gripes involving having to devote so much free time to her care telling my daughter that if after Mom dies and she sees me crying she’ll know the only reason I’m doing so is because I think someone judgmental might be watching.

Right now, my fear is if I start crying I may never stop.

Related . . .

Mom’s making crazy contagious by a nose

Mom’s sad decline

Mom struggles with new remote

Yesterday was the best Halloween ever

Brownie points: confessions of a bad son

How to kill your mother (with love)

Mom thinks I work in a hardware store

My gay friend John

Last Easter, Mom nearly choked in church

Mom’s hip nipples and Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Listening to classic rock with my senile Mom

Moving Mom to Latrobe: The big picture

Being upfront about my behind procedure

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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.

Related …

Doc pays $500,000 for colonoscopy banter

The skinny on rectal bomb implants

My facial procedure & aversion to big ass needles

Save health care: Cure hypochondria!

Fainting again at my routine physical

Soothing drug-addicted babies

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A pharmaceutical giant that makes billions aggressively marketing addictive opioids — side effects may include constipation — is now aggressively marketing a drug that relieves opioid-induced constipation.

Side effects do not include, apparently, an appreciation of fine irony.

I’m interested in this because I’ve been feeling a bit constipated myself lately.

Constipated with love!

Let me explain.

Our daughters’ baby years are far behind us and our grandparent years — knock on wood — are likely distant.

I miss holding babies. My babies, sure, but any old baby will do.

The memories are indelible. The tiny fingers, the hot little breaths, the heart beating like a locomotive just getting ready to really roar. Holding a sleeping baby — holding the future — is magisterial. It is at once awesome and serene.

The feeling inspired me at the time to write the, for me, profound line: “Holding a sleeping baby is better than any drug.”

But because I’m a real world guy, I followed that yin line up with the following yang: “But babies wake up and become the reason many parents turn to actual drugs.”

Sad, but true.

While a sleeping baby can be magnificent to behold, a wide awake one can be an incredible pain in the ass. They scream for no apparent reason, they vomit on freshly changed onesies and soil diapers with alarming frequency.

Many pinched parents turn to drugs. Hard drugs.

Addiction is our epidemic curse. I feel heartsick for the scores of adults who fall prey to it and its strangling consequences.

I feel worse for their children. Our neonatal wards are becoming crowded with babies born addicted to drugs their mothers took while they were pregnant.

But what can I do about it? My professional life’s such a mess many people suspect I have to be addicted to something narcotic. It would sure explain a lot.

Val knows how I feel about these things and she had a suggestion: I should check out the baby rockers.

I told her I prefer the geriatric rockers like The Stones and Tom Petty.

“No,” she said, “the hospital is looking for volunteers who’ll help soothe babies born with addictions. You go in and they give you an addicted baby and a rocking chair. It does wonders for the baby.”

Experts say the human touch is essential to helping these narcotically-addled innocents heal. In many cases, the baby rockers become momentary surrogates while the mother recovers from her own addictions.

I’m thinking about doing it and encourage you to do the same.

Here in Latrobe you can find out about it at the “Angel Arms” Facebook page.

And if you don’t have time for that, innovate. There’s bound to be someone in your life who could use a healing hug. It could be a child, a co-worker, a neighbor or — who knows? — maybe someone who sits across from you at the dining room table.

Lesson?

It never hurts to hug. In fact, we’re learning you can literally hug the hell right out of someone.

Side effects may include a better world.

Related … 

Prince death & the nation that pees purple

Pill disposal difficult to swallow

Doin’ drugs at the ol’ drive-in

Martin Shekreli patents the sun

The Suicide Pill