Getting Your First Colonoscopy at 31! Yay!

It's not that bad! Really it's not! Okay, the part where you have to drink the stuff that makes all crap leave your body is REVOLTING. Like cough syrup's evil twin. Worse is the day and a half you have to spend not eating, or eating green and orange jello (no blue or red) and tea, and water, and chicken broth and crouching on the floor with your stomach cramping from hunger and your head spinning (the vomit feeling you get fifteen minutes after drinking the mixture is awful too). By the time you get to the hospital the next morning, you are falling-down hungry and so excited to be over and done with it so you can eat food that you're practically screaming STICK ANYTHING YOU WANT UP MY ASS! I DON'T CARE! JUST HURRY UP!

I remember calling my boyfriend a tall drink of water in front of the registration desk person because I could barely think straight. Then you get little warmed socks and a gown and an I.V. dock and sit and wait to lose your butt virginity (unless you've lost it already, of course) among the mostly older women, a forty-something woman next to me who also had colonoscopies in her thirties, all of us a strange little club of naked magazine-reading cyborgs with plastic docks taped in our hands (naked underneath hospital gowns, not reading nudie magazines, though that would be terrifically amusing).

Then they take you in, and this I remember so vividly: the ceiling was this beautiful bejeweled display of back-lit photos; they had replaced some of the tiles with images of fish and coral and such, and it was very pleasant looking up at them. Then the doctor came in--it seems so wrong to meet a doctor for the first time in a hospital gown does it not?--a very nice Indian man, and explained about being in a "twlight" state. I don't know if my body listened because I think I conked like a conch shell, and from that time on it was a whooshy dreamy floaty experience of which I remember once blinking at a yellow computer screen and hearing someone say, look there's your polyp. Then I blacked out again very peacefully until I was given cracker and juice options (saltines, cranberry) and pinched my cheeks to look rosier for my waiting knight who was going to take me home and FEED me. A few weeks later they came back and said the polyp they found was benign and that I wouldn't need another colonoscopy for five years (yay!) Small blessings abound :)