Fun Thing to Do at Fifty

Get a colonoscopy!

If you haven't had one yet, you have no idea what you're missing.

I must admit I was nervous, about the part where they put you out, the anesthesia part. Back in the day, when I was doing work in transplant, I routinely gave lectures on the relatively long odds of getting, say, AIDS from donor tissue (greater than one in a million), as compared to the still unlikely but nonetheless greater possibility that the person giving you anesthesia would inadvertently kill you (one in twenty thousand).

In short, your odds of getting knocked off by the anesthesiologist were a lot better than your odds of winning anything more than pocket change in the lottery. And people were still buying lottery tickets ...

This knowledge has stuck with me, as has the memory of holding my son and feeling him go limp during the three years he was treated for leukemia, when he got put to sleep something like fifteen times, give or take.

And did he whine and bitch and fret about it? No. Did he walk around and wring his hands, thinking, Oh Fuck! What if I don't wake up? No, I—Donna and I—did that for him. He was brave. And so, I would have to be brave, but ...

My point being that, after much considering, I looked in the mirror one day and said: Quit being such a wuss!! Your wife got epidurals, your son got propophol; step up to the plate and get yours!

And so I did, last Friday. And how did it go? you ask.

Let me begin by saying that I haven't fasted for a long time—decades, actually—and have never done what is called "a cleanse." When you get a colonoscopy you get to do both, for about $2500.00, retail. You really don't eat anything more involved or nutritious than popsicles for about twenty-four hours. Still, if you drink your coffee black, as I do, you can drink as much as you want up to three hours before the procedure, which I personally found made the whole thing a lot more civilized. You can be very hungry, yet quite awake, when the time comes ...

As to the cleansing part, I figured it was a bit like getting the floors refinished, the walls sand-blasted, what they did with Paris back in 1989, ahead of the Bicentennial celebration of the raid on the Bastille—they cleaned the fucking place, really well. Gave it a good scour, since no one had really cleaned, say, the Arc de Triomphe in, well, centuries, and now—I was there—look how nice it looked! Lovely Paris! That's what's going to happen with my colon and large intestine, I figured, it'll be all cleaned up like Paris was back in 1989.

That, along with the black coffee, and popsicles, put me in a pretty good mood.

And, of course, everyone in your household is pretty sympathetic. Everytime the children would get in my face about something, Donna would get after them. Don't bother Daddy! He's having a colonoscopy tomorrow! He might shit on your toes! It was great. I watched the Colorado Avalanche's opening night game with the Blackhawks on the television, drank my prep that I'd got from the pharmacy earlier, and shit my brains out between periods. There was order in cleaning out, unlike, say, raising children, cleaning up after children, that I found refreshing.

I got up early the next day, without an alarm, and did the same thing in the morning, with two big cups of black coffee, while I watched the price of gold go up on Bloomberg. Donna took the kids to school, and by the time she got back, Paris was shining, like in the storybooks.

We got to the clinic shortly before ten, Donna and I—you have to have a driver: No colonoscopy if you don't have a driver! ... which I also found pretty civilized. I went up to the desk and they told me to pick up the white phone to my right and let the person who answers know that you are here—which, though everyone seemed happy, and helpful, seemed a bit like asking to be let into a prison, or through the pearly gates (the white phone, the clouds, the inviting, glowing tunnel). But that's probably just my active imagination ... on no food and two big cups of black coffee.

But the real fun didn't begin until we went back and they handed me not one but two Johnny shirts. You put the first on the normal way, then the second over it like a housecoat, to keep your bare ass from showing. Thoughtful, yet ... given the sheer volume of asses going through there each day, I can imagine this is more for the staff than for the actual privacy of the patients. One can only stare at so many fifty and over asses before it gets, well, tiresome.

And the nurses were pretty cute. Which doesn't hurt when you're fifty and over. A cute nurse asking, "So, when was your last meal? When was your last drink? Do you drink? How much?"

I looked at Donna, who's a nurse, and my lovely wife—we drink together sometimes. We have children ...

"How many martinis a night would you say, dear?"

"Shut up," she replied.

We agreed that I maybe—maybe—had two or three drinks a week. Then I started to laugh, and Donna told me to quit it.

After she, the cute nurse, asked me if I smoked—this while another nurse, also pretty cute, stuck an IV, quite expertly, in my hand—she asked, "Any recreational drugs?"

I hesitated a moment, and replied, "Like, would I like any, in my IV?"

No, that wasn't what she meant, silly. "Have you done any?"

I looked at her.

She added, "In the last thirty days ... "

"Definitely not."

Then I added, in case there was any confusion, "I'm just having fun. A little nervous, you know, ahead of my procedure."

She understood. "And ... do you have any Advanced Directives?"

These are documents we in the transplant world, back in the day, were trying to encourage people to get completed, so that if they died during a procedure in the hospital, or in a clinic like I was in, it wouldn't be some big production to convince their next-of-kin that they did, in fact, want to (or not want to) donate their organs and tissues. Streamlined things, just in case. All joking aside, it's a good thing. Everyone should have Advanced Directives, a medical power-of-attorney, a reasonable amount of physical gold in case everything goes to hell, and they, above all, should get a colonoscopy when they reach the age of fifty ...

I replied, again after some hesitation, "We're not going to have to go there, are we?"

Ha ha, ho ho, hee hee. "Probably not."

Yes, I said, of course I had Advanced Directives, and so did my wife. We were both plug pullers by temperament ... and they could strip me clean in the unlikely event that things went terribly bad. Then I told her how, back in the day, I used to take bones out of people, after they were dead, after we'd dug up the Advanced Directives ...

"Would you SHUT UP," said my wife, who, when we first met, thought it was way cool that I'd taken out bones and organs, and saved lives, and flew on Lear jets and shit like that. It's one of the reasons she married me. She's as twisted as I am that way, don't let her tell you otherwise—I said that to the nurse. I don't think she believed me.

And then they told me to roll over on my left side. And then they gave me the drugs ...

And I met the doctor, and we talked about hockey ...

I don't have the slightest idea what aspects of hockey we talked about, if it was the Avs game from the night before, or the fact that my older boy, Joe, plays juniors out in Wisconsin, or that my younger son, Ian, plays at the Y—I don't remember exactly, at all, what we talked about, but, according to the doctor, it was hockey.

What I remember is chattering on, staring at the screen with little transition from the time before and after the drugs got squirted into the IV, pleased at how clean my colon and large intestine appeared, thinking they looked gold-plated, glowing, like that tunnel to heaven I'd heard about. I haven't the slightest memory of them blowing up my intestines with air, which the cute nurse told me they would do, and that I would have to "pass gas" afterward (I imagined one of those guys on the Pearl Street Mall, filling my large intestine and making it into a seahorse, handing it to some kid who would then bounce it around until it got caught on the ceiling of his family's home, or batted around in the ceiling fan, until his brother stepped on it and popped it; I don't know why I imagined a seahorse, but that's what I imagined, a seahorse); I don't remember anyone sticking anything in me, wiggling it around corners, this way and that, pulling it out—nothing.

We talked about hockey.

And then I farted. Considerably.

"Things look great," he said, the doctor, afterwards, minutes after he was done and I'd farted. "See you in ten years!"

"Okay! Adios! A bientot!"

And then I got dressed and they wheeled me down to the front door, and Donna, my driver, and I went to lunch.

They tell you not to eat anything spicy, or too rich, that it probably isn't a good idea to order a martini with it all, just to see what happens. Not if you're picking up your kids (on foot, of course) in an hour.

Which we had to do, so ...

I had coffee, black coffee, and a glass of water. And a French Dip ...

Welcome to lovely Paris!

It was all very civilized.