Wheeeeee! I had a colonoscopeeeeee!!!!!

Now, now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Heather! You're only twenty-nine years old [in giant tortoise years], why on earth would you get a colonoscopy, surely those procedures are for people in their late sixties?"

Yes, yes, dear friends, I am very much too young to have a colonoscopy. But I did it because my poor husband has had two in the past year. No, no, that's not true. Remember my story a long time ago about how my body has suddenly decided to hang on to every little thing that goes into it? Well, after a neat little test where I swallowed a pill filled with radiomarkers and then got x-rayed a couple of times over the week showed absolutely nothing, my doctor suggested I have a colonoscopy.

And I was all like "YEAH! Cause I cannot wait to do something like that, that sounds awesome." Except for the parts between YEAH! and awesome.


You know, I was torn about it at first. Should we go on a vacation? Should I have a colonoscopy? Vacation? Colonoscopy? It was tough.


I scheduled the first one in May.* Annnnd then I cancelled it. I had a legitimate problem! I'd lost my prepwork paperwork and ate breakfast, thusly getting myself kicked out of the process. So I scheduled it again for last week. Annnnd then I cancelled it. I had a legitimate problem! I had to be in Iowa that day.

Soooo, I finally got suckered into it today. Prepwork yesterday. Yesterday, while I was in Iowa for a breakfast meeting and then Nebraska and then flying home to my family in time to pick up my kids from school. Perfect. Cause you know what sucks about prepwork? EVERYTHING.

There's the part where you can't eat solid foods the day before your torture procedure. Then there's the extremely large amount of disgusting liquid you have to chug in timed intervals starting at 4:00 p.m. and lasting well into the night. Oh, and those liquids? Yeah. They cause some very interesting reactions within your guts and you spend quite a bit of time either in the bathroom or rushing to the bathroom.

This morning I managed to get the kids to school before collapsing on the couch and waiting for my hubs to drive me to the hospital. I was even patting myself on the back about how well I was feeling, all things considered (which means without any food or caffeine in 24 hours since I am apparently addicted to both of those things) when I ran into a wall. Not a proverbial wall. No, a literal wall. My eyeballs suddenly became disconnected from my brain and their movement became unpredictable and irregular and I became dizzy. This is when I found the couch.

But! The good news because I'm all focus on the positive now is that I survived the procedure with only minor screaming discomfort afterwards and my innerds are clean as a whistle, or they were until I ate California Pizza Kitchen for lunch afterwards.

So. There you are. If you have to have a colonoscopy, you can lean on me. You will survive it. You will hate every ever-loving minute of it, but you will survive to eat another day. Oh, and I highly recommend you schedule it for a day that's predicted to be over a hundred degrees because hospitals chill you to the bone (it's so you're halfway there when they have to cool your body for the morgue) and you'll need the extreme heat to warm up afterwards.

- H


* You know what finally helped me make the phone call to schedule my torture session? I was watching TV one day, thinking about it, telling myself there was nothing wrong with me and get over it already, when a commercial came on and this young woman said "I was thirty-six years old when I was diagnosed with colon cancer." Now, mind you, I'm only 29+8 so it shocked me. I picked up the phone.