Yes, it’s a weird topic to post here for a technology site. But here me out; I had a colonoscopy and I wanted to say that this was worth it. For the years since I turned 50, I’d been doing the very easy-to-use and FIT Test. ¹ This test has always been great because of its ultra-low impact. Do it, send it back. Boom, results. Rinse and repeat every couple years. This last time, however, there was an anomaly. This then led to a Doctor visit and a referral for a full-blown colonoscopy.

To say I was ambivalent is to put it mildly. What was coming felt scary – not to mention having to drink “fruit” juice² that is supposed to clear out your guts in what seems like the most uncomfortable way. This stuff was intended to clean out my intestines, and oh gosh, over this period of time, it did the job. What came along for the ride was a bunch of queasiness and diarrhea. Each gulp of the solution made the process progressively more difficult. Making it colder and sucking through a straw helped, but only minimally. I wanted nothing more than to not screw this up, so made sure to follow the instructions.

The day of my procedure was more than inauspicious; a blizzard swept in two feet of snow. The clinic called me in early because people were cancelling. To top that off I need to take a 2.5 hour train ride to get from home to the clinic. The universe was making this challenging, but not impossible. To top it off, I didn’t want to have any unexpected bathroom emergencies while I was on a train or in some other unfamiliar location. Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and getting into the clinic, they seemed to have seen everything.

The people at the clinic were a top notch group. They assisted with everything needed, took their time to explain things whenever something was about to happen. Leading up to the procedure itself, I was told I’d be put to sleep during the “work” and would wake up after it was all done.³ One I made it into the room, the doctor let me know when he’d start putting me to sleep and, wow, it was fast. I was out quicker than he could finish his sentence. But, something wild happened, I woke up while they were in the middle of the process. Looking up, I could see a monitor with what made me think of the movie Innerspace. The sensation in my butt also came back as I’d realized what I was looking at was my own intestines being traversed with a camera. Oh, an I really had to fart.

Yes, lots to take in and, uhm, let out all in one moment. These new sensations were not painful though; they were more awkward and uncomfortable. Not scary. In fact, once the surprise of waking up had passed, I found myself enthralled by what was going on in from of me. The view was extraordinarily clear (I did my job with that crappy drink), and as the doctor encountered a small polyp, he surrounded it with what look like a clamp thing and removed it. All the while, he was jovially explaining the process. It’s as if he was happy to have an interested audience for work so many fear.

Needless to say, there is no photographic evidence of the event. None of this was as awkward or scary as I’d imagined and I was more than glad to have taken care of it. If this is the worst one has to face to avoid cancer, it is minor. If you are a man who is fifty-plus years old, please get screened as soon as you can. Some are calling for screening as early as 45, and I can get behind that. It seems Ontario can too, as they will also lower the screening age to 45. Great news. Protect yourself, get screened.

1. Provided here by the Government of Ontario ↩︎
2. The stuff is called PegLyte and you have to drink four litres of it before the colonoscopy. No indication of what fruit makes the drink taste like a two-year old tried to create a fruit flavour with crayons. ↩︎
3. The aesthetic used here was Propofol ↩︎