Every time I end a SCUBA diving trip, I dedicate the final page in my diving log to "for next time" reminders. As I age, and as my health either improves or worsens, there are specific things I need to remember the next time I dive. At the top of the list is my weight at the moment and how much extra weight I needed to dive. As my weight constantly fluctuates over the years, it's easy to go back and find a weight that matches my current one and then know how much extra weight I should request. Second on the list (or possibly tied for first) is how my sinuses were working, whether or not I was diving sick, and how much medication I was taking. Since I can't dive without steroids, and because the recovery from steroid use afterwards is so trying, it's good to know exactly how little I can take and still dive the next time. Of course, if I'm diving ill, there is a whole cocktail of steroids and Sudafed and antibiotics which is never pleasant to take but that I need to record. I also write down recommendations of restaurants if I've found a new one, or what to order at some of our usual haunts (the shrimp tacos at Sunshine Grill are seriously to die for!)
So, this post is in the same vein, but colonoscopy style.
Yes, I turned 50 this past year, and as I've been discovering, getting older involves an increasing number of ignominious procedures. As if getting older and feeling my body fall apart wasn't bad enough.... I'm honestly glad that I didn't go in for a mammogram at the recommended age of 40 but instead managed to postpone it for ten years (despite John bringing home order after order that I could just "take in" to get a mammogram #poorguy). There was nothing wrong over the past ten years, and I avoided that horror for a while.
But with my history of irritable bowel syndrome, and my dad's history of ulcerative colitis, and my paternal grandmother suffering from Crohn's Disease (colon cancer), I figured I should probably go in for a colonoscopy. I really didn't think it would be that bad for a couple of reasons:
1. A lot of people get them. I remember going in for sinus surgery once, and while waiting in my little cubicle for surgery, there were older people in their own individual cubicles across the floor waiting for colonoscopies.
2. John has gotten one. Yes, last year, when John worried that he might be developing cancer somewhere in his body due to all the stress he was under, he signed up for a colonoscopy. For him, waking up from anesthesia was the best part of the year for him, and hearing him in the bathroom was probably the funniest part of the week for me!
3. They're fast. John was in and out in no time, and those people lined up across the floor? Yeah, they got to leave the hospital before I did with sinus surgery. I remember one of the girls' violin teachers had a colonoscopy in the morning and was teaching lessons that afternoon.
4. How bad can they be? In one of my favorite movies, "Ghost Town", Ricky Gervais does an excellent job of making the whole thing look ridiculous. I mean, laugh out loud, tears running down my face from laughing, ridiculous.
So with all of that going for me, I figured I would be good to go.
(The one really bad stressor though going in was my history of sexual abuse. The idea of something happening to me while I'm asleep is about the worst situation I can be in mentally. I replayed over and over in my mind, in the weeks leading up to the procedure, what would happen, and I literally couldn't even process it all. In fact, at the moment, I am losing huge chunks of my hair, and I'm guessing it's because of the underlying stress I felt for weeks.)
The difficulty of scheduling a colonoscopy should have been an omen for me that it wasn't not going to be as easy as I thought. The crazy thing was that I didn't even need an appointment with a doctor before one (which I find crazy), but man, getting the actual thing scheduled was phone tag with the doctor's scheduler for weeks.
I was sent the instructions of what to do leading up to the test. The main concern for them was the high dose of aspirin that I take daily because aspirin is a blood thinner. So basically, if anything in my colon gets dinged, or scraped, or heaven forbid perforated, I would end up bleeding A LOT. So I had to go off aspirin for a couple of days before (which doesn't really make a difference--it takes weeks to reverse those effects, but whatever. I'm a compliant patient.). I also had to limit my diet two days before. No seeds, fresh fruit or nuts. I asked John about this, and he told me that the pieces of those things can get stuck in little ruts in the colon. Okay.
So I went to the store and got "the prep". For John and basically every other person on the planet, they get a prescription for a bottle of stuff they need to drink. As Meg told me, my GI doc (whom, again, I had never met) had a "ghetto" prep of an entire bottle of Miralax and four Dulcolax laxatives all taken with 64 ounces of any flavor Gatorade that wasn't red, blue or purple in color.
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| The Dulcolax doesn't even deserve a mention in this post. It did nothing. |
Oh man, I'm not a fan of Gatorade, but I have to admit that the clear Gatorade is decently tasty, especially when I couldn't have anything else to eat. And I've taken Miralax once before in my life--it's not the gritty Citrucel that my grandmother used to drink each morning. So I measured out half the Gatorade and half the Miralax and mixed them together in a pitcher. Every 15 minutes, I was to drink another 8 ounces.
Just like I can have an entire branch in my eye and not notice it thanks to wearing contacts for the past 35 years, I don't think my colon is very sensitive to anything because it's been through the war zone of IBS, every antibiotic in existence, and steroids. Nothing happened for a very long time. I mean, when Meg and John both did the prep, they started and stopped within about 3 hours. After 3 hours, mine hadn't even started. Maybe it's that "ghetto" prep?
But about five hours afterwards, I was going through the expected results and probably would've been laughing at myself if I had been on the other side of the bathroom door. I went to bed at the normal time (11 p.m.--okay, it was a little early), and I set my alarm for 2 a.m. Yes, because my test was so early in the morning, I had to do the other half of the prep beginning at 2 a.m. NOT THAT I THOUGHT THERE WAS ANYTHING LEFT IN MY COLON AT THIS POINT!
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| This was my "I can get my shorts off quickly" outfit. Too bad it didn't make it through the entire night... |
Bad idea. Very bad idea.
FOR NEXT TIME: Measure the amount of liquid in the pitcher.
And because I just wanted to go back to sleep, I decided to drink TWO cupfuls at a time.
FOR NEXT TIME: Do NOT drink two cupfuls at a time.
I laid down for the next 15 minutes increment and felt things starting to move through very quickly. I ran into the bathroom. And then I felt it....
As an adult, when I'm about to vomit, my mouth starts salivating like crazy, and I soak my clothes with sweat before it happens.
Which is exactly what happened. And all the while, feeling like I was going to pass out from the nausea, I couldn't believe what I knew was going to happen, especially considering I couldn't leave the toilet. I would've grabbed the trash can but it came so quick so that I ended up projectile vomiting in a 90 degree arc in front of me. Thankfully, I just missed the wall (it was about two inches too far away), but I soaked the floor and all of my clothes.
And I don't know if this is a blessing or not, but it was just water since there was nothing else in my stomach. Round Two happened about ten seconds later, but this time I was ready with my neck craning over the edge of the sink....and it all just conveniently went down the drain.
I got up from the toilet, stripped down to pure nakedness, left my clothes in the cesspool of Miralax water, went into our bathroom, took a shower, dried off, went back to the guest bathroom, used the towel to soak up what I could on the floor and threw everything in the washer.
For the next hour, I slept like a baby.
But 6 a.m., the alarm went off, we rolled out of bed and got in the car. I'm not sure what John was thinking but he started telling me about all of his cases from the day before, several of which had negligent doctors at the helm. I finally had to cut him off, telling him that in my level of stress (not having eaten for 36 hours, the projectile vomiting, the emotional stress of the procedure, the worry about the results), I didn't need to hear about doctors who didn't do their job right. And he was doing the normal things he does when he drives that put me over the top.
One nice thing was that the procedure was happening at a Beaumont hospital which is the health system that currently employs John. For the past couple of years, we have had to do things at hospitals that have been affiliated with the people who took him down and ruined his career, so walking into them, he's always worried that he'll see someone he knows. But this time, we were in the free and clear. So even though the entrance we were supposed to go in was closed because of COVID, we were fine driving around and finding the correct entrance. There was no anxiety for him which I needed.
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| Meg asked me to document my colonoscopy journey for her. Most of my texts involved pictures that looked like this. This one was from the first restroom I found once we stepped foot in the hospital. |
As it turns out, I was the first patient for the as-of-yet-unseen Dr. Cutler.
FOR NEXT TIME; Do NOT be the first patient of the day. You won't need to get up in the middle of the night to take the prep to prepare you for an 8 a.m. colonoscopy. Shoot for 11 a.m.
The nurses were great, although I can definitely see the difference in the treatment of regular patients versus family members of doctors. In the past, John has always been with me, and people have known him, and I've been treated really well. Being the daughter of a doctor too, I just don't think I've ever seen how non-doctor family members are treated. But John couldn't come with me, and it wasn't John's specific hospital, so there was no connection to him. The nurses were competent (which really is the most important), but I felt like a specimen. They talked about themselves and their lives and shared jokes with each other while I just laid there. It really could've helped my nerves if they would've talked to me, but it felt like an assembly line of patients, and I think I was just another cog in the wheel.
Even when I was rolled into the procedure room, Dr. Cutler sat a counter at a computer on the opposite side of the room with his back to me, and asked me my name and birthdate....and then proceeded to keep talking to the nurses. I NEVER SAW HIS FACE.
I've had enough surgeries to know when the Versed/Propofol is kicking in, and I started voluntarily counting backwards from 100 just to be funny. I've never made it past 96, but this time I made it to 94 and was surprised that I was still coherent. But then I was waking up, and HEARING Dr. Cutler tell me that I was extremely difficult to get under anesthesia which quite frankly comes as no surprise. I've woken up randomly during previous surgeries, and I've actually come out of the Versed fog and spoken to people in procedures. And when I had my first ankle surgery, Dr. Barter said that under no condition would he take the one screw out in the office--I needed to be FULLY under because I didn't handle the pain at all well when I woke up. And I woke up crying from pain after my hysterectomy. But again, I didn't actually SEE Dr. Cutler, so I couldn't get any more information.
I was super dizzy which the nurse told me was from the huge dose of Propofol they had to give me, but there was no time to delay. She had me sitting up and getting myself dressed within minutes (in the past, I've always been given time for my head to stop spinning), and even though they didn't know yet if John was ready at the door with the car, they started to wheel me out.
Good old John--there just so happened to be a First Watch about 550 feet from the hospital, and he took me right over to get some comfort breakfast food.
In the end, all that matters is that I have a clean colon. I have some diverticulum which Dr. Cutler told John is typical for people who eat American diets (in other words, we don't eat enough fiber), but I don't need to return for ten years.
So I can't even imagine being 60 years old, but hopefully 60-year-old me will remember to look back on this post and pay attention to what to do "for next time". Life will be much easier, trust me.
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