Colonoscopy....this is one for the record books

Today’s story is sure to lift you up and let you know that one of God’s greatest gifts is laughter – and especially if it’s laughter shared with someone else.  I had a good friend whose children were always doing crazy things, like pouring shampoo on the bathroom floor and sliding in it, things that as a mother, it was so good to laugh at when it wasn’t my children doing it!  Oh, I knew my turn was coming, but there’s nothing like looking at someone else’s situation and enjoying it from afar.  Which brings me to today’s story – see, I can only tell this story today as my parents are traveling back to Florida and on the road, so I’m hoping my dear classy mother won’t take time to check out my story today, as she would die of embarrassment that I’m going to tell you something so personal and “not to be talked about in public!”  Someone needs this today, so I’m willing to lay myself out there so you can laugh your head off and know it can always get worse!

I was going through a very stressful time at work, and I developed colitis.  Well, we all know what that brings – oh, another whole set of stories!  I had a friend who struggled with colitis for years, and she carried toilet paper in her purse for those random trips over the guardrail while traveling the interstate.  Oh, I laughed at her and with her…boy, when it was my turn, I was laughing no more – how awful it is to be in that situation!  My colitis wasn’t healing up, so they decided I needed a colonoscopy.  I had heard about the stuff you have to drink and how terrible it was, but I really wanted to get relief from these symptoms and figured it would be well worth whatever it took.  They give me the chalky stuff (this was 20 years ago or so, before it got better) – I drink the stuff all evening, nothing happens.  I drink some more and it’s bedtime.  I think, ‘Well, it will wake me up when it starts to work,” so I go lay down.  Wake up at 4:00 a.m., absolutely nothing had happened with all the chalk I had drunk. 

So I call the hospital and say, “I’m supposed to be there at 7:00 a.m. for a colonoscopy, but I’m not cleaned out – are we going to have to cancel, or what do we do?”  They say it’s fine, they’ll just do it by an enema.  I had never had an enema before, so I figured, “Gotta be easier than drinking more of that junk!”  I head to the hospital and they put me into a room.  There is an elderly woman in the bed on the opposite side of the room, surrounded by about four women, looked like they were daughters or family of some sort.   I say hello, get on my bed and wait to see what they’re going to do with me.  We sit there in silence, you know how you do, like in an elevator, like there’s some elevator police who is going to show up to check if anyone is being friendly to each other and not looking at the floor acting like we’re all not in this little box traveling somewhere together – and who wrote these rules anyway?  I digress…..

Shortly, the nurse comes in, shuts the curtain on my bed and in not a whisper says, “How do you tolerate enemas?”  I said I guess I’d be okay, I’d never had one.  She explains the process to me, how it is imperative that I hold on as long as possible for it to do its work, and then you need to leave your “production” so it can be checked and measured.  She gives me the enema, all the while my roommates are silent as a tomb, sitting there watching the curtain, I’m sure, knowing exactly what is happening behind it.  She leaves the room and I lay there waiting for it to work its magic.  It begins, I curl up in a ball, and right about the time I think I cannot take one more second, I jump up to head to the bathroom, practically running.   OH NO, OH NO – my roomies are sitting in front of the door! 

They see me coming, looking like I’ve been shot out of the barrel of a cannon, and they begin to look behind them at the door, scooting their chairs, dashing out of the way of this freight train that’s coming through.  Can you picture this?  Well, those few seconds were really just a few seconds too many – I fly through the door, trying to fling it shut as I set my sights on that beautiful little bowl – right about as the explosion hits, I see one of them softly shut the door behind me.  And as the door shuts, I realize it didn’t really matter whether it was shut or not, because there’s a good FULL INCH of open space between the door of that bathroom and the room.  Did the hospital care nothing about their patients’ privacy, or were they just wanting to powerwash the floor and have the flood go right on through to the next room without having to open the door?

I sit there, dripping with sweat, wondering how to casually make my way back to my bed like this tsunami had not just happened. I get up, open the door, greet the embarrassed silence that awaits, keep my head down and make my way back to my bed.  A few minutes goes by and the nurse comes in with a cheery, “Well, how did you do?”  I mumbled something about “Pretty good, I think,” thinking all the while that the chalk didn’t taste as bad as I thought.  She assesses the production and joins me again with the news that we’re going to have to do one more.  Oh my.  Well, at least the path to the door is open….She begins the process and we start it all over. 

This time, everyone in the room was far from the door, but the explosion was still many decibels above the normal conversational level, especially when not blocked by a real bathroom door!  I open the door, slip back to my bed, walking through silence you could cut with a knife.  My chipper little nurse arrives to bring the news that we need to do ONE MORE!  By then, I was beyond any embarrassment, I just needed it to be over!  We do the routine one more time, and as I walk back out to slip back to my bed, one of my roomies says, “Well, how did you do?”  I guess the ice was broken by then…..I’m still laughing as I type this.  We began to talk and I learned that their mother was in the hospital for breast cancer, and while waiting on my actual procedure to come, we visited and talked, having been intimately introduced through humiliation and mortification – amazing what a little dose of that does to open up the walls of friendship!

They take me down to see the doctor, and it was our neighbor, Doctor Vongsnakorn, and I tell him, “Listen, I hear you can dope me up so I don’t even know what’s going on – and after the morning I’ve had, I sure would like to just sleep through this thing and know nothing.”  He says he’ll fix me right up, and he does – I awake after the procedure, having slept through the whole thing.  Doc comes in and says we need to just do one more thing as my colon was too long and they were not able to see it all.  I think, “Whatever.” 

They put me in a wheelchair and take me into the x-ray room to do a barium x-ray.  I am so medically stupid, I knew nothing about these things.  Only thing I knew, the people that worked there, I knew several of them – had gone to high school with them or just knew them from the community, and they were nice as can be.  They put me on the table and explain the process, that they are going to insert barium into my hind quarters through a little tube that has a little ball on it that they expand to make sure the tube inserting the barium does not exit the area they are trying to fill. 

As they’re adjusting me on the table, my stomach begins to cramp – I mean, really cramp.  I’m feeling awful.  They keep reiterating that it is very important that I lay extremely still, do not move, and I am cramping so bad, I just want to curl up in a ball.  I tell them, “I don’t feel good, I think something isn’t right.”  They say, “Oh, that’s natural after what you’ve gone through, you’ll feel a little gassy, but it will pass.”  I’m thinking it’s not passing, I’m dying here, trying my best to lay still, cramping, cramping.  All the sudden, out of NOWHERE comes this huge TORNADO!  The little hose flies across the room, hits the wall, the barium explodes, landing on the faces of those leaning over me, some of it hitting the ceiling and the wall, spraying all down my legs……I thought I would die. 

Big tears begin to slide down my face, and I say, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!”  They say, “It’s okay, just go into the restroom and wipe this barium off yourself, clean up a little, and we will try again.”  By then I am DONE, just DONE, and I said, “NO, there is no way we are doing that again.  Just let me get out of here – I’ll just keep the colitis!”  They pack me into the wheelchair and get me back to my room.  There sit my “friends,” who immediately say, “Well, how’d it go?”  I tell them the whole thing, and by now since we’re the best of buddies, we all had a good laugh…..well, that is until my cheery nurse comes by with the news that if we don’t do another enema or two, that barium is going to set up in me like concrete, so I’m right back where I started hours ago!  One of my friends said if I hadn’t been so “full of it,” none of this would have happened….and she may be right!
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And what can we get spiritual out of today’s story?  Take care to do as God’s word says and examine your heart and what you have on the inside, because you never know when it might just sneak out in a random explosion and show people what you’re really made of!  Hope you enjoyed a laugh at my expense today….make that a New Year’s resolution, to laugh more, love more, care more about what God thinks than what people think….