August is like the Sunday of summer…

A colonoscopy this week, my first after 66 trips around the sun, set me back a couple of days. You always hear how terrible that procedure is, and it’s not much fun, but I’ve spent twenty-five grand to have even less fun. The prep work just takes up a lot of time. I should be able to bill Medicare too since I did most of the work at home. The medical staff were friendly and professional. More on that in a minute. The actual procedure was an IV insertion before wheeling me to the operating room where I remember talking to someone for about 60 seconds. Then, lights out. Next I recall waking up in the recovery room. No pain. No regrets. No colon cancer. Thank God. The only bad news was I had twelve polyps and they removed seven. I get to have a second colonoscopy at some future date to be determined. No problem.

Thanks to life in this modern era, the medical personnel had unlimited and unfettered access to me. I must have received a hundred text messages and made to create online accounts for several medical portals all with “new” messages waiting for me to read. I received at least twenty reminders for the procedure and twenty more as the cutoff for eating solid foods approached. That made me more anxious about the procedure as I was getting a real time countdown for two weeks for something I had been dreading. I assume our wonderful, technical, digital future will eventually include AI countdowns for our death: “Don’t forget, you will die in 168 hours. Tell someone you love them”. “96 hours until you drop dead, eat something good”. “You are scheduled to die tomorrow, are you ready?”

Ahhh, the miracles of modern life. But seriously, get a colonoscopy. It’s painless and the prep work isn’t nearly as awful as you might imagine. If you have avoided it for years, like me, you will end up kicking yourself once it’s over and you realize how simple and painless it actually was.

So there I am, wearing nothing but a hospital gown and lying on a bed with wheels. Two nurses are with me, one asking me a lot of questions, the other putting an IV in my right arm. Trust me, small talk is a handy tool in a situation like that and in just a few minutes we were all laughing and cutting up over some silly thing or another. I had been asked, by multiple people, a long list of questions about things like any meds I was allergic to, or if I had family members who had colon cancer. One question, “do you use a soap that will make hospital tape not stick?” threw me for a loop. How would I possibly know that?

But then I was asked, for about the 4th time, do you have any metal objects in your body. A little exasperated at answering “no” yet another time, I went full wise-guy and said, “not unless I have some alien implant I don’t know about”.

And boys I gotta tell you, the air suddenly got serious. Very serious. Deadly serious. The nurses looked at each other and then at me and wanted to know more. It was actually difficult to make them understand I was just kidding. But it was too late. The convivial moments we enjoyed just seconds earlier was over and they were suddenly all business. It was as though I had touched a raw nerve and I wanted to ask them if they had seen patients with alien implants but the moment had passed and I’ll be damned if I don’t now believe something must be going on in the medical community that few are willing to talk about…