Getting a colonoscopy is easy. Prepping for one, not so much. I spent the day after Christmas doing what I call “studying” for it. The course of study went a little something like this.

Wake up the day before the anal invasion and eat…nothing. No solid food whatsoever is allowed. You can drink clear liquids like water, soda, and Gatorade. No red or purple Gatorade though. Of course, red is my favorite and I had a ton of these in the house already but this day it was forbidden fruit. Since I’m trying to cut back on soda it was pretty much water for me. I was also allowed to eat chicken bullion broth. You know how people say a lot of things taste like chicken? Know what doesn’t taste like chicken? Chicken bullion broth. It tastes like water. Slightly stinkier water than what I had been drinking all day.

At 4 PM I had to drink a 10 ounce bottle of something called magnesium citrate. At least this had a cherry flavor and it wasn’t that hard to get down. However, once down, I started to hear the slow rumble of thunder in the distant recesses of my stomach. Over the next couple of hours, this thunder would start to increase in intensity until there was a cacophony of rumbles. I can only assume that the cherry liquid was doing battle with what was left of my Christmas dinner.

Now the real fun begins. I had to mix half of an 8 ounce bottle of Miralax with a 32 ounce bottle of Gatorade (orange, not red). You ever try to mix that much of a powdered substance in a bottle of liquid? It doesn’t work too well. I ended up having to pour the whole concoction into a huge beer mug that I used to take to the Cinema Cafe because they would give you a discount on the beer if you had a previously bought mug from them. In this case it now contained a somewhat granulated substance that I tried to pretend was an orange crush mixed drink. It took a lot of imagination. I was supposed to drink it in two hours. I got it down in about an hour and a half. One minute later the fireworks started. If you are squeamish about descriptions of bodily functions you may want to stop reading. It’s only going to get messier from here.

At first “things” came out rather like soft serve ice cream. While it might have looked like ice cream, it certainly didn’t smell like ice cream. Then things progressed to what I can only call “peeing out my butthole”. Ten minutes was the greatest length of time I was able to spend outside the bathroom between episodes. This went on for some time before I was finally spent enough to attempt to go to bed. I actually managed to get a few hours of sleep before the next round of “studying”.

My wife gave me a new Amazon Echo Spot device for Christmas. It’s like the regular Echo but more of a compact version that can sit on your nightstand and act like an alarm clock. Know what the very first command I gave it?

Alexa, remind me to get up 5 hours before my scheduled anal assault, which happens to be 4 AM, so I can mix the last half of the Miralax into another bottle of orange Gatorade so I can drink it, then spend the next several hours chipping porcelain out of my toilet from the high pressure streams of liquid yellow water that I’m projecting.

It dutifully reminded me, and I dutifully did it. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the hospital from my house, so I took my last toilet trip and then we hightailed it. It took all the butt clinching prowess I possessed to make it there without having a very messy automobile accident. Even at that, it was a close call. As the nurse was trying to go over paperwork with me I had to explain to her that if I didn’t get to a bathroom soon, I would be signing everything in “yellow” ink. That comment was enough to pause the paperwork drill while I took care of business one last time.

After that, things went pretty smoothly. They had a well oiled machine in process in the ole endoscopy suite. There were about 30 beds set up with curtains between them and they herded everyone around like cattle. They made this here bull strip down to his birthday suit and put on one of those gowns that leave nothing to the imagination when viewed from the back. They put in an IV line and then wheeled me away to the procedure room. I mentioned in the previous post that I would also be getting an upper endoscopy so I shared the same joke with the nurse about hoping that if they used the same camera they would start up top first. She chuckled a bit, as if she’d heard that one before, then showed me the two different cameras. The upper camera didn’t look too intimidating. The lower camera was on the end of a coil of wire that looked to be 30 feet tall and might be used on damns for checking the structural integrity of the concrete within. I nervously chuckled myself and told her that I guess she heard all the jokes before. She confessed that mine had been heard often but that the other day they had a guy in that had a tattoo artist for a girlfriend. When they folded back his gown they discovered she had put temporary decorative artwork with arrows pointing and the words THIS WAY IN! As she was telling me this story I heard the anesthesiologist say, “I’m injecting the anesthesia. You’ll feel a little warmth as it…” Then I was waking up in the recovery room. So like I said, the actual procedure was easy. You sleep through the whole thing. Wish I could have had some of those drugs the day before.

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