The Dreaded "C" Procedure

In case some of you were wondering where I've been the last few days, I have a horrific tale to relate. I've been subjected to the worst homophobic nightmare that a straight red-blooded American male can imagine. The very word sends terror into the heart of testosterone-dominated chauvanistic protective reflexes. That word is COLONOSCOPY.

The thought of some quack wielding a tool that can best be described as a plumber's snake with a camera stuck to it and shoving it deep into my body through a forbidden orifice in the name of medical science strikes me as the kind of insanity only found in mad scientist movies. The fact that the "benefit" of this torture is the early detection of cancer raises for me the question "what is the unbeneficial result?"--leprosy? They call this a "procedure", the definition of which is "a step forward". This didn't seem like progress to me, actually I felt that I was lying on the track watching the approaching locomotive.

To compound this disastrous situation, I was told to eat nothing but tasteless jello and liquids the day before the event, and nothing until my scheduled time on C-Day. Meanwhile, I had to take some Fleet stuff that drained me of all life-giving sustenance and kept me (like a felon's ankle bracelet) from moving more than 30 feet from the nearest john until thoroughly evacuated. Any shred of dignity was thereby banished from my system along with everything else.

On C-Day, a relatively benign-looking individual identified himself as my colonoscopy (that word, that word) physician. He didn't appear to be Dr. Mengele until he started telling me some of the things that could go wrong, like my dying after he accidently ripped up my colon or his leaving enough air in my body to cause excruciating pain for an indefinite period of time. THEN he hands me a waiver to sign. As I was about to call in the Marines, or maybe the Mossad, someone squirted a Mickey into my IV and I went out like a light.

I woke up later feeling fine but ravenously hungry. Luckily the nurse stayed far enough away so that I couldn't gnaw on her arm. I was told that they had found only one polyp, and that looked benign but would be tested. That polyp meant that I had to redo the procedure in 3 years instead of five. I have never felt such blind hatred for an innocent piece of flesh.

We stopped at Home Town Buffet where I ate them into a quarterly deficit. Other than some soreness in a delicate part of my body I had apparently escaped unscathed. I'll tell you this though, I'm never having a Brokeback Mountain experience no matter what Capote said.

Later.