My Colonoscopy
(Or why I'll never drink ginger ale again)
by Wayne Wood

As an article title, I’m the first to admit that “My Colonoscopy” doesn’t have the got-to-read-it gravitational pull of, say “My Six Months of Captivity in the Amazonian Jungle,” “My Experiences (Along with Paris Hilton) on a Nude Pirate Ship,” or even “My Recipe for Cranberry Apple Crumble.”
Still, there are a couple of points to be made in defense of the whole colonoscopy thing.

Point 1: A colonoscopy requires 24 hours or so of less-than-totally-comfortable (though certainly not excruciating) living.

Point 2: At the end, you will likely hear that you don’t have colon cancer; although

Point 2 (a): If you do have cancer or a pre-cancerous polyp, it will likely be far more treatable now than if you had put off your colonoscopy.

So, to sum up, you invest 24 hours of relatively minor discomfort in order to either get very good news—and, let’s face it, “You don’t have cancer” is pretty darn good news—or at least give yourself the best chance of dealing with whatever else as early as possible.

The downside is that you may never think of chicken broth or ginger ale in quite the same way.

At least that was my experience. You have probably heard that in order to have your colon completely examined, it’s necessary for your colon not to have in it what your colon normally has in it, if you get my drift.

So in order to clear the decks, so to speak, you will need to take a product such as GoLYTELY, which, I hope I can say without being sued, is one of the most misleadingly named products in history. Seriously, it’s as if somebody went around marketing bark mulch under the brand name SweetNTASTYEE. GoLYTELY is a class of product that falls under the snappy sobriquet “bowel evacuant.” I’ll bet your sphincter tightened as you read those words.

Since on the day before a colonoscopy, you are limited to clear liquids after noon, I stocked up on ginger ale and chicken broth. I had the broth for both lunch and dinner that day, and mixed the ginger ale with the GoLYTELY solution to make it more palatable. The directions say to drink an 8-ounce glass of the mixture every 15 minutes until a whole gallon is gone.

I used to really like ginger ale.

There is nothing quite as droll as the printed patient instructions that accompany this preparation phase. “You will need to plan on being near a bathroom for the entire evening,” one laconically notes.
Yeah, I’d say my experience was consistent with that bit of advice.

One overlooked advantage of colonoscopy prep, though, is that you can take care of a lot of reading that you’ve been putting off. I discovered this when a friend of mine confessed that he had been putting off reading a book I had written until his colonoscopy.

“Your book is great colonoscopy reading,” he said afterward. I’m considering using that as a cover blurb on the second printing. Movie viewing is more problematic. I seem to recall that my wife Sharon and I were trying to watch a movie on DVD that night and that the pause button got quite a workout.

The next day, Sharon and I made our way to the Gastroenterology Clinic at Vanderbilt, and I met the cheerful staff of the clinic. One of the staffers, it turned out, was a former E.R. nurse with whom I had often talked by phone but had never met.
“It’s so nice to put a face with a voice,” she said.

“That’s not all you’re going to be putting with my voice,” I told her.

An IV line in my arm fed an anesthetic, I rolled onto my side when I was told, and, honestly, that’s about all I remember. I know that for television reporting purposes, Katie Couric was fully conscious when she had her famous nationally-televised colonoscopy several years ago. I was not. If you get a choice, I recommend my method over Katie’s.

Pretty much the next thing I remember was Sharon’s lovely face in the recovery room as I woke up. The gastroenterologist who had performed the colonoscopy came in to tell us that everything looked fine and that I wouldn’t have to do this again for 10 years. Sharon drove me home—it’s a requirement that a patient getting a colonoscopy have a designated driver—and I took it easy the rest of the day.

I wouldn’t say this was my favorite couple of days in my life, but really it was no big deal. And in return I found out that my colon was fine, which—stop me if you’ve heard this before—is really good news.
There was one major downside, though.

I haven’t had any ginger ale since.