The Colonoscopy Question: To Resuscitate, or Not to Resuscitate?

Nobody’s Perfect

“Human have gotten along millions of years without colonoscopies, I just don’t understand why all of a sudden, you must have a test when nothing is wrong…I mean, why have a procedure that is unnecessary when you feel perfectly fine…especially when you COULD die from it?” I said.

My doctor, just shook his head. Every year, I would go into his office, and every year, he would tell me I should get a colonoscopy. He was PUSHING it. I imagined him making some kind of kickback….It’s not that I didn’t want to experience the pain, after all, I’d gone through a Caesarean, where you wake up and realized that oh..they DID cut through seven layers of muscle…stomach muscles you DO need to walk, who knew? I still remember trying to walk out of the parking lot to the children’s hospital where my newly born son was lying in an incubator…it took me about an hour just to get to the elevator.

…and gall bladder removal, where you realized that nobody will tell you that without the gall bladder, food actually travels at the speed of light through your body, the gall bladder acting as a traffic stoplight…even a snickers candy bar would go into my mouth and come out in a matter of minutes.

And they say the gall bladder is useless. THEY LIE! I was always calling up doctors and saying, “What is this green stuff coming out of me!” Nobody knew. It took a year for the alien gall bladder bile to disappear into probably some other organ in my body— like my ears. I should have called Steven Spielberg.

And most painful of all…I’ve had countless tooth infections, and root canals. Imagine what it must have been like before dentists? Pulling a tooth without Novocaine? Who knows how many wars were started by Kings with serious tooth decay?

What I wanted was my doctor to give me statistics. “Google it.” he said, as I saw him getting madder by the minute. Frustrated. Then he let it out. One of his patients was a mere 40 years old. He had cancer throughout his colon and didn’t even know it. He died. If he had gotten a colonoscopy, he would have lived. He didn’t want me to blame HIM if I had gotten colon cancer.

“Why in the WORLD would I blame you for the colonoscopy that I didn’t get?” I asked.

I guess his other patient did.

But, my real fears came from what I had heard, late at night on the radio. The radio host was really upset about his best friend, who had gone in for a routine colonoscopy, and was now, DYING…in a hospital. And this radio host talked about that for the next week. As far as I know, he is still there…punctured by some evil needle that couldn’t find its way back to the hole it came through.

Stuck. Blood oozing out all over his liver.

Surely, that would be my luck, I thought to myself. Out of the thousands, it would be me.

Even after reading Dave Barry’s famous colonoscopy column (Google it) I just thought..it’s all so unnecessary. O

And then, my wisest and dearest friend told me….do it. And so, I made the appointment.

Can’t be so hard, right?

As the day approached, I didn’t tell any of my friends. I didn’t want to jinx it.

Of course—there were papers that you had to sign….and then I saw it—there it was:

“Death COULD happen to you. ” sign here and relieve us of any charges.

I knew it. ..that mention of death again. They didn’t tell me that when I got my gall bladder surgery.

More directions: Don’t eat popcorn, hard fruit, raw vegetables and do not eat the day before AT ALL.

Drink all you want, and then pour this bottle of stuff in a glass and drink three 16 ounce glasses of whatever you want— but you do this all in just one hour.

You MUST drink all three glasses. And cool…you could mix this laxative stuff with any drink you like. I had SEEN what Coke could do in science class…you can launch a rocket with coke and Alka- seltzer, so I figured, Coke. That will clean ANYTHING out. It works great on car engines.  If I’m going to do this, I want to use the most lethal soda on the planet.

Sounds easy right? It’s not. That night, I read two whole books in the bathroom. ….and

The next morning, zombie eyed..you do the same procedure all over again.

I had basically bloated my body with so much water, I could have passed as a floatation device in the nearest ocean.

I went into the office at after noon. I felt at least six months pregnant. My stomach was holding a water baby.  As I walked into the office, the admitting nurse was curt:

“Come with me, you have to sign some forms.”

After signing about 1,345 more papers, the nurse looked at me and said…

“Do you want to be resuscitated?”

“What? Is this a trick question?” I asked.

“Do you want to be resuscitated?” she asked again.

Okay. Now. This was the real reason I didn’t want to be her in the first place, and so, I was right! I could die on that table, and they would look down at the paper I had just signed and say…

“Well, it says here, she doesn’t want to be resuscitated.”

“NEXT! “

I’m not kidding.

As they reeled me into the room, I looked at the doctor and said,

“I’m scared.”

“I was my first time too,” he said. Meaning, the doctor had had more than one.

Great. Just knock me out. Which they gloriously did. That IS the best moment. They should bottle THAT stuff and sell it on the open market.

As I woke up, the doctor came right in…and so, nothing was wrong. They found a perfectly healthy and exceedingly CLEAN colon to which the doctor was very happy, as I’m sure he was, if you could have seen some of the people who were waiting n the waiting room…I was quick and easy. I wondered if I would have gotten such a clean as a whistle colon HAD I still had my gall bladder.

Was this the happy ending to the story?

Well…there is one thing they don’t tell you. And it’s that they fill you with air.

Yes, like a flat tire being filled, they actually pump you up with air to do whatever they do in the great labyrinth of what is called your intestines, better known as the great highway where no man has gone before.

They blow you up…ha ha! Who knew?

Afterwards the nurse was pressing on my stomach to push the air out.

Funny. The nurse won’t resuscitate, but pushing out air is something they really do like to do.

As I was getting ready to leave the nurse said, “Well, good news! You don’t have to have another one of these for ten more years.”

Don’t tell my doctor. Hopefully, he’ll be too old to remember my name.

 

March 17, 2015 - Posted by Joyanna Adams | Life, Uncategorized | life