So here’s the kind of crossroads most people don’t face: I missed a gig this week because I had to prep for a colonoscopy. I’d put it off for as long as I practically could, and I spent Thursday night and Friday morning drinking the Magic Solution and…um, watching sports on the TV through the open bathroom door.
I’d had a sigmoidoscopy — a sort of Colonoscopy Lite — some 25 years earlier for a health issue, and my memory of that caused me to find any excuse to put off the current procedure. But like anything else health-related, the colonoscopy and prep has improved in the last quarter-century, and now I’m mildly embarrassed I waited so long.
It’s the prep that really annoys you, as everyone notes, but this prep only involved drinking two glasses of a mildly citrus-y solution and eight small glasses of water over a 12-hour period. Back In The Day, you were given a giant jug of fluid and a variety of other paraphernalia for the prep, and you had to choke all that stuff down (or do other things with it that I’d rather not discuss). In this case, I had no problem drinking any of it, and the results were…well, thorough and spectacular.
I can’t really tell you much about the procedure itself. The staff was good-humored and efficient, the GI doc had an actual personality and obviously knew what he was doing, and the anesthesiologist was a big, big NPR fan (for a while, I was concerned he wouldn’t put me out until he had thoroughly debriefed me). Procedures vary from practice to practice on how to anesthetize patients — so-called ‘twilight sedation‘ is very popular — but these guys put me under all the way. Considering the speed at which I went under and came out, I assume they used propofol or something similar — you know, the Michael Jackson drug. So: One moment I was discussing “Car Talk,” and the next, a nurse was asking me how I felt. That was pretty much it.
It took about an hour after that for the fog to clear from my head, and I did have some brief intestinal cramps afterward, but that was it in terms of aftereffects. They did find a polyp, but the doctor said it was very small and almost certainly not cancerous. That’ll probably earn me a return visit in five years instead of 10, and it certainly validated my decision to get this over with.
And tonight, I have another gig that I’m going to make. Perhaps I’ll sing this fantastic Robert Klein song (you have to wait about 30 seconds to get into it):
