Colonoscopy
Yesterday I had a colonoscopy, which means that I went 36 hours without food and experienced my first bowel prep. As with many things, I approached it with the same curiosity I would other aspects of life. Like how long does it really take to clean one’s colon? How does it feel to fast for an extended period of time? Can I find a broth or a gelatin dessert I like?
I’m not a big meat eater, and was vegetarian for eight years before my daughter’s birth. So the clear liquids diet seemed abhorrent to me, and the fact that they asked you to avoid nuts, seeds, whole grains and vegetables and fruits with skin for five days also troubled me.
The directions for the prep said I needed a 64-ounce bottle of Gatorade, but not in red, orange or purple as those colors could look like blood in the colon. I didn’t know if blue were okay. I looked at all the flavors in ever store and it looked like yellow was the only color that was safe. Except Gatorade is gross. And it’s hard to find a 64-ounce bottle of Gatorade, so I had to hit the grocery stores. That’s a LOT of Gatorade.
I told myself– find a small bottle of a flavor that might work and taste test the Gatorade. But even then I could not do it.
I looked at this logically. The whole point of the Gatorade is to suspend the Miralax powder into a liquid and to offer the body electrolytes so you don’t end up horribly dehydrated. Gatorade is not the only electrolyte drink out there. There’s also Propel, G2 (okay so that’s just diet Gatorade), and high-end products like Liquid IV. I’ve been down this rabbit hole before with research when my primary care provider suggested I drink more electrolytes to treat my orthostatic hypotension. I already had a favorite.
(Here’s an old blog entry about the cardiologist I now refuse to see who thought he knew better than my primary care provider. Smug little doctor man. And here’s another that mentions electrolytes.)
I ordered myself some of my favorite electrolyte powder (Powder Vitamin Plus), in lemonade, unflavored and ginseng green tea. No colors.
As for clear liquid diet… I made chicken stock and froze it. But, I don’t like chicken broth and I could not convince myself to thaw it out and drink it. I found some gelatin that expired in 2022 from when I promised I would make Eva finger JellO, but I couldn’t find the JellO. Eva also brought home a bottle of Sprite.
I used the Sprite and a random can of Beetlejuice spiced apple soda from Fanta to make one batch of finger JellO but the color of the soda was bright green and I expected it to be golden. I also made a batch with white grape-strawberry juice (and that was diet).
Saturday morning I had a big salad, removing all the items from the “avoid list.” Then I had a decent dinner, and a few homemade Christmas cookies. Lately, if I have more than three Christmas cookies, the sugar makes my belly feel wonky and this night was no exception. I stopped eating at 6:30 Saturday night (and didn’t eat solid food again until 10 a.m. Monday).
On Sunday morning, I made some electrolyte water and a hot ginger drink. Midmorning I made black coffee and laced it with a little chocolate chip cookie dough Torani syrup. For lunch, I had a heap of finger JellO and a small cup of vegan soy ramen broth. In early afternoon, I drank a cherry Coke zero.
I took my first set of laxative pills at 2 p.m. and an hour later, well you can imagine the results. I already had no stool left in my colon, but as most of my intake had been brown liquid…
At that point, I filled a glass jug with 64 ounces water, and a scoop of lemonade electrolyte powder and a half scoop of the ginseng powder. I shook and started to add the miralax powder. Except it didn’t fit. Even with me stirring with a long spoon as I added it slowly.
I poured it all into the blender, which resulted in about 72 ounces of final mixture.
I put it into the fridge, with the overflow in a mason jar so that I could track how much I was drinking.
At 6 p.m., I started drinking. At first, it tasted good. The directions said to drink half. Now, at this point, it already looked like my colon was clean. And I was supposed to drink it in about an hour. A glass every ten to fifteen minutes. I managed the amount suggested in an hour and twenty minutes. By the end, I never wanted to see the mixture again.
The final set of laxatives were at 8 p.m. I went to bed about 8:45 p.m., but my lingering cough kept me up, and every time I coughed I had to use the bathroom. I finally dozed off at midnight, only to be scared awake by my alarm at 3:45 a.m.
My procedure was scheduled for 9 a.m. and the directions said to finish the prep mixture four hours before the procedure. I went downstairs and poured a glass, drinking while I watched the Apple TV program Trying. I made it through almost two glasses. Then the drink started to gag me. And I used the bathroom and saw that my waste was still as clear as my urine so I returned to bed.
Around 6:30 a.m. I woke again and took a shower. Checked my blood pressure and my weight. Blood pressure up, weight down by 3 pounds.
Eva took me to the hospital at 8. They had asked me to arrive by 8:15 a.m. Now, I schedule a lot of these procedures at St. Luke’s Easton Campus as it is about 600 steps from my house. It’s usually empty, and the doctors and medical professionals there always seem to take good care of me. I used the self-check-in kiosk and went up to the Lotus waiting room.
That waiting room is full of the chairs that I love. We had a teal chair that we called “the throne” that I bought myself when I found it on clearance. I loved that chair, but in its first few months of owning that chair, we got a puppy who ate the chair. We tried several times to fix it, but she repeatedly ate the chair until there was nothing left. For a while, we took the legs off and set it on the floor with a slipcover over it and just gave it to the dog, but eventually, we gave up and threw it away. Which broke my heart. Because she also ate holes in my couch.
When I ended up in the ER for stitches in March 2023, after the fall that left the scar under my lip, I noticed the Lotus waiting room was FULL of my chair. Half of them in the color I had purchased, half in St. Luke’s blue. I had been admitted to an upper floor, perhaps the third. I looked down upon the chairs as I headed for the door.
It’s an ugly waiting room with a collection of my chairs.
They took me back to the unit at 8:40. Eva had to leave to feed some clients breakfast and the nurse told her to come back to this waiting room. The unit looked the emergency room from every television medical drama made in the last thirty years. There was another person there getting prepped for something. And maintenance men changing the lights which technically put them at an angle where they could see through all the privacy curtains from above. Not that I care.
Two nurses started prepping me and the doctor and the anesthesiologist lined up for my consent and the consent of the person next to me. The whole process was a very efficient assembly line. I mentioned that during my prep all I could think about was saltines. And the staff laughed and said they could handle that. The nurses took one look at my tiny veins and I think they panicked. They got a third nurse specifically to start my IV.
That IV was beautiful.
She was like an IV angel.
Normally IVs are a tumultuous experience for me. When I had my tilt table test, the man who administered that IV dug around under my flesh for what felt like an eternity and left bruises all over my hand and arm from his failed attempts.
I have never had blood draws as smooth as what this nurse did yesterday. I included a picture: If you see the three dots on the top side of the frame in the middle of the edge of my hand and think of them as Orion’s belt (they are from an old cat scratch) and travel to the middle of my hand slightly to the left, you will see a tiny pin prick– and not the one between the two lines on my wrist– that’s where my IV was. There is no bruising. At all. I had an IV in this hand and there isn’t a single piece of evidence that it was there!
As the placed an oxygen mask over my face and told me to turn to my side, someone else gave me an extra pillow concerned for my comfort. My last thought as I watched the nurse or whomever finish pushing the plunger on my medicine was “Why do I need to be comfortable? I’ll be unconscious.”
It was 9:20 when I woke to a small bottle of water and a pile of saltines. I texted Eva and she was almost to the hospital. The doctor told me he did find and remove a polyp. And I was home by 10 a.m. And the saltines were delicious.
