THE COLONOSCOPY

A lot of people think of a colonoscopy as a messy event in a person's life.  Actually the colonoscopy itself is not messy at all.  As a matter of fact it is quite clean and sterile.  It is the preparing for the colonoscopy that is messy and it can get extremely messy.

The objective of preparing for the procedure is to clean out your colon and bowels.  Not just get them clean but squeaky clean.  This preparation involves drinking gallons upon gallons of fluids, taking more laxative than is recommended by the drug companies followed by more gallons of liquid and another huge dose of laxative and rounding it out by drinking more liquids and then sitting on the toilet for 18 hours with one good long book or two to three shorter books.  Do not attempt this with a magazine.  The magazine will not last long enough and you will end up using the pages of the magazine for a purpose they were never intended to be used for and could clog the pipes of your toilet in the process.  Two cans of air freshener is another idea that should be put to use during this preparation time.  You know when the preparation is finished when you sit on the toilet and drink some clear fluid and it immediately comes out into the toilet with the same consistency that it entered your body.

I could write pages upon pages of the messy stuff involved in a colonoscopy but let's move on to the story that I wanted to tell.  It happened two colonoscopies ago meaning about six years.  When the Doctor does the colonoscopy, you are put under anesthesia so that you don't feel what the doctor is actually doing to you, something that I would guess the majority of the population does not want to happen to them although I am sure there are a few of you out there who might not mind it too much, which is disturbing in and of itself.

The story begins during the procedure while I was fast asleep dreaming of who knows what.  Something went wrong and I ended up with a little pocket of air lodged in my colon that they could not remove without my help.  As I awoke slowly from the anesthesia I began to become aware of something strange.  I was still pretty groggy so I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or it was really happening to me but I remember thinking that everyone should have a bottle of this anesthesia at home.

I was in a little enclosed room laying on my side in a fetal position on a nice padded table and I was feeling the pain associated with gas in the intestinal area.  It was a bad pain and did not hurt as much if I just lay still and not move.  Then I noticed the audience that was surrounding me in that little room.  My wife along with three nurses were rubbing my back, my arms, even my leg.  I think it was my wife doing the leg rubbing but this was turning into a fantasy pretty quick so I mentally placed one of the nurses as the leg rubber.

Then I started hearing their voices.  They were asking me, no begging me to"toot", to "relax and let the air out", to "give a little puff" of air, once I could swear I even heard one of them use the word "fart".  Was this for real?  I was in a room with four fine ladies actually begging me to fart.  This was one thing I never would have imagined happening to me.

Now I imagine that on the male fantasy list, women begging you to fart is probably not in the top ten or twenty for that matter, but surely it has to be in the top fifty somewhere.  So on that cold winter day, in a small room in a hospital, a fantasy was fulfilled.  I am not quite sure if it really was one of my fantasies, but surely it was someone's fantasy, which is why I decided to share it.  To give a glimmer of hope to someone out there that it is possible to be in a room full of women begging you to fart.

It is things like this that make America great.  Next week I have colonoscopy number three and I wonder if I will experience yet another fantasy, hopefully one closer to the top of the list.