In order to be adequately prepared for a colonoscopy, you need to get to a point at which your poop looks like pee.
It’s the one time in your life when yellow liquid shooting out forcefully from your butt is a WIN!
I share this with you not to gross you out to the point of leaving my blog never to return, but in order to do my part towards colon cancer awareness and, like Katie Couric (although not as gracefully) to show that colonoscopies are not as bad as they sound.
I’ll let you know on Saturday if that’s true or not since I’m heading in for my first one tomorrow.
Sure — colonoscopies involve your butt, or as Dave Barry so appropriately coined it, your “behindular zone.”
And yes, the prep towards colonoscopy involves a lot — yes, a lot — of poop.
And no, poop blogs are not as popular as mommy blogs or political blogs, but since this is a personal blog, I decided I couldn’t receive full penetration by a camera attached to a long tube without sharing the experience with all of you.
I won’t be instagramming my IV insertion (since it’s usually a long and painful process for a nurse to find my veins), or tweeting my ease into sedative-induced slumber (because if the IV found its way in, it means it’s time to finally relax), but I do hope to encourage a few folks who have been putting off their recommended colonoscopy appointments by detailing how “not-so-bad” my experience was.
Here’s why:
My grandmother died of stomach cancer.
I was 12 when she died, but I vividly remember her wasting away in the months prior.
I remember what my grandmother looked like before — alive, full-busted and round. And what my grandmother looked like after — suffering, yellow and skeletal.
All my life, I have been troubled by a sensitive stomach and by these images of my grandmother, and if a colonoscopy can somehow alert me to pre-cancerous polyps, I think it’s well-worth the poop.
Wish me luck.
- EDITOR’S NOTE
I completed the procedure this morning after the moderately challenging prep and happy to report clean results. I will say this — reading message boards about the prep before doing actual prep (drinking a laxative mix that makes you go for 24 hours straight) scared me into thinking the prep would be much worse than it was. It wasn’t that bad. Of course, this coming from a lifelong sufferer of IBS who is not stranger to spending 24 hours on the toilet.
Bottom line: Colonscopy is a lot scarier in your mind than in reality. Get it done. I’m not scheduled for another one for 10 more years. Woohoo!
