ROTFL: Dave’s colonoscopy
If you’ve read this Dave Barry piece elsewhere, you’ll notice that this is a shortened version. We wouldn’t want anyone to bust a gut laughing, especially since it deals with the gut.
About the writer: Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.
I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy.
Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis. He explained the colonoscopy procedure to me.
I nodded thoughtfully but didn’t really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, “HE’S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!”
I left Andy’ s office with some written instructions and a prescription for a product called “MoviPrep,” which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven.
In accordance with my instructions, I didn’t eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor.
Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder in a one-liter plastic jug and fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) You have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.
MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food you have not even eaten yet.
The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I had to sign forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room, where I took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.
A nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. In the procedure room, Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand.
And then it was the dreaded time. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.
I have no idea. Really! I slept through it all. In a moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a mellow mood.
Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that IT was all over and my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.
Memorize these
A few comments to make during YOUR colonoscopy in case you don’t sleep through it:
1. “Take it easy, Doc. You’re boldly going where no man has gone before!”
2. “Find Amelia Earhart yet?”
3. “You know, in Arkansas we’re now legally married.”
4. “Any sign of the trapped miners, Doc?
