Everything You Wanted to Know About Colonoscopies But Were Afraid to Ask

Hello and welcome to a State Hockey Championship Tournament Saturday, here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is February 22nd, or, if you're a numbers person: 2-22-25, which sounds like a pretty cool locker combination.

Hallelujah, we made it through a week with no illness, unless you count my husband's four-hour nap and headache on Sunday afternoon, which I don't because the guy bounced back the very next day and that was that. I'm grateful for his incredible resistance to maladies because I needed to give all my energy to my first-ever colonoscopy. Or rather, the preparation for my first-ever colonoscopy.

Having lived with two cultures for a quarter of a century, I can tell you there's a marked difference between how Americans and Czechs discuss intestinal activity. American etiquette generally eschews conversations such as these as gauche, whereas Czechs grab this topic by the horns and plow forth unabashed. Even now, it's far easier for me to type průjem than diarrhea yet I'm doing this in a public-service-announcement spirit because, if you ever have intestinal distress while visiting the Czech Republic, you will want this word in your lexicon right after pivo. Especially after you've consumed pivo, and especially if you've consumed klobasa with your pivo.

In today's blog post, I'm going to lean into the Czech way and share everything I learned about colonoscopies (because I wasn't afraid to ask) and I'm feeling a tender Willie Nelson sense of gratitude to all the folks who shared their hard-earned wisdom with me. I dedicate this blog post to you.

The worst part is the prep - If you think having a minuscule camera inserted into your anus is the ultimate unpleasant, uncomfortable, unimaginable  (not to mention embarrassing) Discovery-channel-documentary-experience part of having a colonoscopy, think again. This is the BEST part. (More on that later.) When people tell you prep is the worst part, that's their polite way of shaking you vigorously by both shoulders and saying, "LISTEN to me. PREP is the worst part."

Because it absolutely is.

Clear your schedule - Because prep is the worst, you need to prepare. A useful tip that came in while I was on the toilet (on a Wednesday) was to schedule your colonoscopy for a Monday morning so you have Sunday to rest and poop in peace. Take this advice. While I knew that I was supposed to take the day off from work to recover post-procedure, what I wasn't prepared for was how much of the day prior I would have to devote to the cleansing process. Thank goodness the nurse who called last week set me straight when I asked her if I could start the whole "process of elimination" after I finished teaching church school around 8pm. She gave me a polite, yet resounding, Scandinavian "No." Bless her heart.

The 4 liters of solution you have to drink is disgusting - This isn't a tip, it's the gol' darn truth and you need to know this. Now, I'm a positive person; incredibly cheerful and optimistic. So I made the classic rookie mistake of believing it wouldn't be that bad. "This shit is nasty!" I shouted to my empty house. I was dropping expletives well before the excrement. I almost started writing this blog post after that first chug of the God-awful stuff to plaster my indignation all over the internet in Letter-to-the-Editor fashion that someone with a shitload of money hasn't been pissed enough yet to insist some food scientist get on it and make this stuff taste better. I'm sorry, but I still refuse to accept the "Oh well!" shrugs of the medical community on this.

Make it taste better - Way back when I scheduled my colonoscopy, a nurse who'd felt similar indignation had given me a tip to make it taste better. The problem was I couldn't remember the tip. Was it Gatorade? Crystal Light? Am I supposed to mix it with something? The directions clearly said do NOT mix the solution with anything other than water. After that first drink, her words snapped my synapses. "Add Crystal Light Lemonade. Not anything else. Lemonade." I riffled through my pantry for the remaining five-year-old packet I knew I still had. Sure enough, I spotted the familiar label like the comforting lighthouse beam from a promising shore of salvation. I ripped it open and dumped it into my gallon jug. Confused as to why I wasn't rewarded with that signature yellow hue associated with the Crystal Light brand, but a dismal (and worrying) brown, I looked at the label. Lemonade iced tea. I didn't even like iced tea. Still, something was better than nothing, and the silver lining of not remembering the tip exactly meant that I'd purchased some Gatorade Zero (no red dye - that's another tip from the Scandinavian nurse) and incorporated it into my drinking regime as a chaser after every cup of the prep solution. This helped immensely.

Get your own bathroom - This wise advice came from my friend Jeff, who must have some Czech heritage because he really laid out this tip under no uncertain terms while we enjoyed a pivo at the local brewery. He was adamant about this. "Once it starts, it doesn't stop." Thirty minutes into my guzzling, I felt my guts whir into motion like an 1800s industrial-era machine coming to life. Thank the good Lord for good friends - and that my family was all at church school. Seriously, if you're a one-bathroom household and you live with others, check into a hotel. Your dignity and self-respect will thank you. Do not accommodate others on this point. Even when your youngest son implores you to let him just pop in for a quick pee because it's -20 below and, no, he really doesn't want to pee in the snowbank. There is no bathroom sharing. 

Think no deep thoughts - To pass the time during the requisite 10-minute intervals of each hellish glass, I watched SnapChat, YouTube, and Facebook shorts and reels. We're talking cats falling off window ledges, Ariana Grande and Anna Kendrick's pop-star impressions, and Graham Norton interviews. These reprieves truly helped me to settle down after each bilgy rise of incredulity and psych myself up for another wave of self-induced torture. 

Close eyes, count, and chug - When the directions on the plastic gallon jug say to drink quickly - do it. It took me until the fourth 8 oz cup to believe this, but it's really true. Closing your eyes lets you focus. Counting the chugs it takes to consume one cup (15-ish) lets you know exactly how far you are in the process. Chugging keeps the gag reflex at bay, at least until the 12.9th cup of the 16.9 eight-ounce cups it takes to consume 4 liters of solution.

Positive self talk - That last 4 cups was brutal, I'm not gonna lie. The end was near - only one inch of the nasty to get through, and the worst would be behind me. At this point, I dug deep for any and all inspiration. "I can run 10 kilometers!" I shouted to the bathroom walls. (Because 10 kilometers sounded more impressive than 6 miles.) "I do triathlons!" (Correction: did. But in the moment of delirium, you just roll with it.) "I've birthed five children with NO PAIN MEDS!" *Grrrr...chug, chug, chug*

The morning of the procedure, I was moody, cranky, sullen - and still just plain upset; still baffled that a species as intelligent as humans hadn't figured out a way to make this a more humane process. Yep, I was still indignant. Incredibly. Aggrieved, resentful, affronted, disgruntled, discontented, dissatisfied - all the synonyms I just googled continued to express my sentiment and emotional state perfectly.

So when I arrived at the hospital and the nurse assured me that the colonoscopy was going to feel like a nap (after the IV was inserted), all I could think of was, Yeah. Fool me once, shame on you...

She wheeled me into the operating room where I was greeted by not one, not two, but a team of six capped and gowned smiling individuals. I recognized one of them as the mother of my daughter's classmates. Good grief. I visibly rolled my eyes because, by this point, I had no filter and felt no responsibility to politely suppress my - you guessed it - indignation. The nurse hooked me up to the oxygen; I thought I might cry. As she plunged the anesthesia into my system she said, "This might burn." What?! 

After all I had endured, I was going to experience fire in my veins?

"No, you're supposed to say, you'll feel a wash of warmth," I corrected her.

And the next thing I knew, my eyes opened. The first thing my brain registered was the clock on the wall. It was 10:05. I was back in the prep room. I'd felt no fire. It was over.

It truly felt like a nap - And this was the best part. I'd experienced no walk of shame. It was over and I could walk out of the place, sipping on my well-deserved apple juice, groggy, but with my head held high. The indignation had finally left my body.

On Friday, I regaled my friend Trish with my story and my plan to write this blog post as a gift to all of you. And she asked me, "Why didn't you shit inside of a box?"

Yeah. 

And that's my final tip: Send a sample by mail. 

I don't know the particulars of how to make that happen in Wannaska, but I've got 5-10 years to figure it out.