So this is 50: Your first AARP magazine arrives, and it’s time for a colonoscopy.
The mag’s easy to ignore — hello, recycling bin! — but the other? Not so much. Not with everyone from Katie Couric to Aetna insisting you undergo what must be the Messiest Medical Procedure Ever.
As Dave Barry put it in the column clipped ’round the world: “You don’t want a doctor to stick a tube 17,000 feet up your butt.”
Barry exaggerates: The tube up your butt is just 6 feet long — a bargain considering your unfurled colon is 12 feet — and technology’s improved since he wrote that back in 2008. Still, prepping for a camera to take a tour through your large intestine is no day at the beach. Anyone who says otherwise is full of crap.
But consider the alternative: Colon cancer kills more women than breast cancer and more men than prostate cancer, and it’s preventable. Those pesky, possibly cancerous growths called polyps can be removed, painlessly, during your screening. Done and done!
“I tell my patients that one night of diarrhea beats a month of chemotherapy and radiation,” says Dr. Edward Goldberg, an Upper East Side gastroenterologist who’s performed some 24,000 colonoscopies. (At 52, with a family history of polyps, he’s had three himself.) Says my gastro guy, Dr. Ira Zucker of Bergen County, NJ: “This isn’t elective surgery. This saves lives.”
As I saw it, I had four lives to consider: mine, Bruce’s, Sam’s and Max’s — the husband, son and dog who want me to stick around.
Even so, thinking about the stuff I’d have to drink — Barry described it as “a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon” — made me queasy. So I called my friend Maura, an expert on all things medical. As usual, she knew the drill: “Tell your doctor you want a split prep and Gatorade!”
Split prep, she explained, divided the drinking and purging between the evening before and the day of the op — as opposed to one all-out, explosive night on the throne. And a sports drink, even one laced liberally with a laxative, was a lot easier to swallow.
Dr. Zucker examined me and we set the date. His nurse gave me a three-page pamphlet of Do’s and Don’ts, most revolving around clear fluids before (Do!) and driving home afterward (Don’t!). Apparently, after an anesthesia dose of propofol — what my doc calls “Michael Jackson juice” — you shouldn’t get behind the wheel.
Prep day arrived and I left for work armed with a six-pack of pineapple juice, since solid food was definitely on the Don’t list. By the time I took the bus home, I was light-headed and cranky, especially after getting a whiff of the pizza my guys had eaten before I got there. I took the Gatorade out of the fridge, mixed up the laxative cocktail and drank it down. All 64 ounces of it.
Then I leashed up Max and went for a walk.
Seriously. Because I am an idiot.
We made it around the block before I felt what seemed like World War III shaping up in my belly. Yanking Max behind me, I barely made it to the bathroom intact.
I emerged some time later, panting. Then I went back in again. Out. In. And to think — in the morning, I’ll do it all again.
Bruce dropped me off at the doctor’s at 8 a.m., with me clutching “The Shining” — nothing like a horror story to put a colonoscopy in perspective — and by now I was drained. I changed into a hospital gown and the comfy, cushioned socks, and got onto a cot in some kind of holding area. Cheerful staffers introduced themselves, took my temp and pulse, and eventually wheeled me into the procedure room, where Dr. Zucker and I started talking about Subarus. (We like them.) A slight prick of the needle . . . and then I woke up, feeling strangely refreshed and wondering when we were going to get started. Only I was back in the holding room, and it was over. Done!
My squeaky-clean colon came through with flying colors: The polyps they found had been removed, and I was free to go. Bruce greeted me with the best PB&J I’d ever tasted. The nurses let me take my socks home.
I spent the rest of the day playing with Max and admiring my newly flatter stomach.
“Half of my patients go back to work that day,” Dr. Goldberg tells me. “That’s New York.”
Luckily, I live in New Jersey.
Now, if I could only get AARP to stop mailing me.