Le Colonoscopy

So I'm working on my obsession with my health, aware that - in the big picture - I'm beyond blessed with good genes and a strong constitution.  No family history of cancers or high blood pressure or heart disease coupled with a healthy lifestyle would seem to put me in good stead.

Here's the timeline.  

First on the hit parade was a regularly scheduled colonoscopy.  You're supposed to have one of these done every ten years once you hit 50 unless you live anywhere in the developed world besides the United States where you don't have them done unless you're exhibiting some type of abnormal symptom.  Here we just do it for the hell of it.  I'm assuming a lot of people are making a lot of money . . . 

The general procedure requires that you - and I am not making this up - consume 30 or 40 individual doses of a laxative in a couple of hour time frame.  In other words you drink enough laxative to cause massive bowel movements in a few hundred people AND you take some more laxatives in pill form.  You would imagine that this would produce a pretty dramatic effect.  My GI tract, however, operates on a very regular and very regimented schedule and it does not go quietly into the night when external forces try to control it.  It's a lot like me that way.  

"Don't tell me what to do," my GI tract says.  "I leap into action first thing in the morning about a half an hour after you've had a cup of coffee, and that's my time frame, so get out of my face if you fuck around with this system."

So I poop but not as much as you would think.  I personally would have assumed that there would be a lot of pooping.  Anyway, I go in and have my colonoscopy - after having endured this very unpleasant colonoscopy prep - and the doctor tells me, as I'm groggily returning to consciousness from the sedative, that "my colon wasn't completely cleared out and I'd have to come back in a year and repeat the procedure."  He was backing away as he said this because I was trying to grab a colonoscope and ram it up his . . . well, you get the point.

I make very few absolute statements but there's this: if some expert in the medical community suspects I have a colon tumor the size of a small orbiting planet I may consider another colonoscopy within the next decade but that's going to be a minimum starting point.  I'm not even going to have a conversation about a colonoscopy otherwise.

I can't really complain too much here as this was a normal, regular medical procedure.  I didn't like it but I can't feel too picked on.  I had my first colonoscopy done when I was 50 so I can't even really slot this into the getting old category.  I can, however, slot it into the really gross and unpleasant category.  I wasn't getting colonoscopies when I was 22 I can tell you that.

Shortly after all of this trauma I decide to undertake another voluntary medical procedure to treat something called chronic venous insufficiency.  It turns out that I have not one but two genetic clotting disorders that may or may not predispose me to a deep vein thrombosis.  The risk here is that a small clot may break loose and either lodge in your brain or in your heart and - not to get too technical here - kill you dead.  While I was assured that this was highly unlikely it did get my attention so I decided to have an outpatient procedure done where a vascular surgeon takes very large needles and probes around in my human leg until he finds a damaged vein at which point he sticks the needle into the vein and injects a dissolvable cement into the vein which plugs it up and kills it so that new, healthy, collateral veins form, veins not predisposed to clogging up.  This is done under no anesthesia.  So I was lying on the table while a big guy dug in my legs with big needles.  It was not cool.  Sometimes he found the vein right away and sometimes he had to dig for a while.  Dig, dig, dig, in my leg, with a stainless steel needle.

Funny anecdote: they offered me a Valium before the procedure.  When I was told that this was to help alleviate anxiety and not so much for pain I declined the medication and for good reason - I'm predisposed to anything that kills pain so I think it's a good idea to be cautious.  In this instance everyone in the room - there were four people in the room which is a couple of people more than you like to see in a freezing cold procedure room where you're the person on whom the procedure is being done  - kind of looked at each other and then looked at me and then looked at each other and sort of shrugged and raised their eyebrows, and then the surgeon said: "OK, well, we offered."  

About four minutes into this painful two hour procedure I remember distinctly thinking: "I should have checked with someone about this." 

Here's the thing: this was the first of like five of these sessions, and they never offered me another Valium.  I was too embarrassed to ask for one at that point.  The good news is that the sessions got shorter and shorter - the bad news is that they kept coming. 

So these two voluntary procedures were my entry into my 60s.