Instructions For Your Upcoming Colonoscopy

March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month.

So you’re ready to go anal with someone you've never met before. Good for you!

Your decision is a timely one since March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month. You may not know this because of the ribbon color change to dark blue. No, not dark navy; that’s Bladder Cancer. No....not teal either; that’s Stomach Cancer. This blue is more of a Dook blue. But come on, it’s way better than the fecal brown that was the original color, right? Anyway, back to you.

First things first: call and make the appointment. No, you cannot schedule online. You need to physically pick up the phone and when connected to a real person, speak into it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before you call, make sure you have at least three hours to remain on hold. If you're a barista, Lyft driver, nanny, teacher, restaurant or retail employee....well....good luck.

When you finally reach a human, be prepared to over-share. Height, weight, medications, all diagnoses, all pre-existing conditions, whether you stuttered as a child, were ever anemic and all insurance information. You will not be asked if you have any fears or concerns. (Save those for your therapist.) But you may be asked about your emotional state of mind after multiple hours on hold. You can usually choose to answer that question on an emoji pain scale ( 😃 🙄 😱 😡 ) but no guarantee.

Please note: with 45 as the recommended age and the Covid pause in non-urgent procedures, wait times for appointments are nearly as long as a colonoscope. 

But once you have the appointment all you need to do is follow eight pages of instructions. Be prepared to not eat any food worthy of consumption for three days before your procedure. Raw fruits and veggies are out as are seeds, bacon, nuts and Dave's Killer Bread. Avoid everything red and purple. Avoid anything sticky like gummy bears (all colors) which can act as an adhesive and clog things up. Not clog you up but clog the scope which will be up your ass.

Watch out! Sticky gummy bears! Photo credit: Rawpixel.

After a few days of over-cooked and uninteresting food, you’ll be ready for 24 hours of liquids. At this point you may be doubting your decision to have a colonoscopy. That’s natural. No one in their right mind except Gwyneth Paltrow chooses bone broth for lunch. But---wait! Jell-O! You can have Jell-O. Well, any color except red, blue, purple, orange and pink. But you like lemon-lime, right? You’re all set then.

At the end of a long day--a day without coffee because skim milk in coffee is worse than no coffee at all-- your evening of pleasure begins. The pleasure of sitting on a cold toilet and shitting out every little bit inside your body until you are as weak as a Dollar Store pool inflatable. But hey! You're getting your steps in with the 30+ trips to the potty. Movement is indeed medicine.

Technically, the prep actually began earlier, by mixing the medicated sand inside a plastic gallon jug with water. Just $5.00 and you get to keep the jug! Pro tip: a gallon weighs 8.3 pounds, more than the average American baby at birth, so three weeks leading up to your procedure, increase your bicep reps. The lifting, mixing, swishing and pouring will be much easier. Now you’re ready to rumble!

Nestor licking his chops near gallon jug. Photo credit: me.

Don’t be me and assume you’ll be the one person the poo-inducing juice doesn’t work for. Boy, was I wrong! The crud inside the gallon jug is something called polyethylene glycol (PEG for short). Not that kind of pegging, dummy, it’s a laxative! This magic is designed to get large amounts of water into your previously happy colon and make it sob.  So instead of shit, you’re pooping watery waste that you’d much rather not think about, let alone look at in your stinky toilet.

Listen to me going on and on. If you’ve come this far, you’re very ready to get intimate with a camera. Don’t let me get in the way. Make that call today.

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What’s On Mind:

• Little Free Libraries! I’ve been asking for suggestions on your fave (Durham-based, please) ones for a few months now. I need a few more!

• Female Vietnam Veterans. I’m seeking North Carolina-based women who are military or civilian veterans for a new piece. Please reach out if can help me find any of these women whose stories we shouldn’t forget.

• Breaks. I use Twitter as a Durham news source, for writing community and to stay connected to friends. #Fan. Instagram is more as a journal: a chronicle of places I’ve been, books and food I loved, and a way to crowdsource ideas. Fun but a distraction from real work so I have a social media break planned for May.

What I’m Reading and Loving:

• And Yet by Kate Baer. This slim volume is a collection of fifty-ish poems that recall Mary Oliver, Billy Collins and Maggie Nelson. Baer’s poems are both fiery and commonplace. Poems about mothering and what is means to a woman. Poems about small joys and huge heartaches. Baer is a poet, like the others noted above, for people who don’t “like” or don’t get poetry. I’ll link to one of my favorites, True Grit, in my Instagram story and on my FB page.

• I’ve been in a dry spell with fiction recently, as I noted here. But I’m on fire when it comes to memoir! (What in the world!?) I’m devouring the very raw and rough Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas and Alicia Elliott’s piercing, deeply personal look at colonialism and inidgneous experience in Canada in A Mind Spread Out On The Ground. Moral I’m (temporarily) taking away: people’s real lives are more compelling than what we can make up.

• I signed up for a free trial of The Atlantic for this article on Judy Blume. I was teary almost immediately. Like so many girls, Blume was a part of my teens with her extensive canon on books about kids and growing up. But to read about Blume, now 85, caring so gently for the author (bringing her a hat, asking what she was anxious about as a child, etc) and that for over 50 years Blume has continued to write back to kids who confide in her, returned me to my 12 year old self in the best possible way.