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.

Let's talk a little about poo, shall we?

I have wanted to write about this latest chapter in my life for a while now, but I hesitated. Was it too much information?

And then I remembered there's Twitter and nothing beats too much information like Twitter.

So, the Poop Story. Apparently, according to my doctor's nurse practitioner, I have irritable bowel syndrome (and I am officially Elaine Benes).

Irritable bowel syndrome is great. I never considered myself anal retentive until this past year and then whoa! Am I ever. So I would eat and eat and eat and....nothing. Nada. Well, nothing except my belly would get bigger and bigger and bigger until I could swear I felt a baby moving around in there and would run down to the Dollar Store for a cheap preggo test, despite the fact that there is no way on God's green earth (ok, maybe only .001% of a way) that I'm pregnant.

After about a year of this (I'm a slow learner), I broke down and called my primary care doctor. Their office has this ridiculous system for making an appointment. You never speak to a human being, you leave a voicemail on the message line and "someone will call you back to schedule an appointment." What? You're an office that relies on appointments and yet you can't seem to employ someone to make them. Nice.

Well, I dutifully left a message for my doctor, explaining that I think there's something really wrong with me and I want a referral or recommendation for a gastro who can appropriately diagnose my colon cancer, since by then I'd decided I must have cancer.

And then I waited. No one called.

And no one called.

Three weeks later I got pissed off about something else (I'll give you one guess) and not liking powerlessness in my life, I opened Word and shot off a letter to my doctor.

Dear Dr. S,
Your system (or lack of) for making appointments with you
sucks. No one ever calls me back. I trust your opinion and need it in times like these, when I think I'm dying.
Thanks,
Heather

I am paraphrasing, but you get the jist. I was sure the letter would never land on his desk because I see where mail goes in a doctor's office and it's not straight into the doctor's hands.

To my surprise, I got a phone call two weeks later. The office manager said Dr. Sanders had given her my letter, they'd made changes to their call-you-back system, and they were sorry. Did I want to make an appointment with him?

I hesitated.

It's like complaining about your food before it gets to your table. Do you really want to eat food that someone's spit on? After you cross a bridge, be sure not to set in ablaze, kay?

I made the appointment because I wanted to make sure my insurance company pays for my colon cancer treatment. They wouldn't let me see my doctor, they shuffled me to his nurse practitioner, who was decidedly cold when she first entered the room.

So you know what I'm thinking.

My file totally has a giant red mark on it. There are notes about me, and I'm not talking about my medical history. I'm a problem patient.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that I now have an official diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome, and my bloodwork showed that my thyroid is fine. Always good to know.

The bad news is I have to exercise and change my diet. And now maybe I also have to find a new doctor.

- H