Surly

So it's colonoscopy time again next week, and I'm surly about it. I don't mind the procedure. I even enjoyed the first one -- or was interested by it, anyway -- because they didn't put me under and I could watch my insides on the monitor. The procedure is fine. What makes me grumpy is a) it's a hideously expensive and elaborate test without a large likelihood of return on investment, and b) it disrupts my painfully-arrived at diet for a whole week, forcing me to choose less healthy foods. No seeds, no nuts, no whole grains. So my breakfast oatmeal, with chopped nuts, is out of bounds. Replaced it with home fries this morning. The quarter cup of peanuts I eat in the afternoon I guess gets replaced by a couple tablespoons of creamy peanut butter: I'll need to go buy some today. And the flax seeds I chew in the evening are of course out. For a week. To reduce the chances of an early exit by colon cancer by half a percent, or whatever it is, while taking the small but severe risks of bowel perforation, bad anesthesia outcomes, and hospital-sourced infections.

The only real reason I'm going ahead and doing it is to convince my doctor that, although I won't take steroids, I'm really a good little patient who usually does what he's told. And the only real reason I want to stay on good terms with my doctor is that if I'm dying in pain I'll want opiates, and the physicians' guild holds the monopoly on them. Simple as that.

Among the many ironies of my life is that politically I'm dedicated to universal health care that, in my own person, I don't particularly want. I would far rather go without health insurance. Much of modern American health care, and especially the expensive parts of it, I would gladly forgo. I want the vaccines; I want the emergency trauma care. I want the check-ups. But I don't want a heart transplant. I'm not excited about dragging out my potential cancer death or cardiac failure, and I have no interest whatever in spending much time in the sleepless disease-vector boxes that are modern hospitals. God. TVs on all the time, lights never more than half-off, and never a let-up in the goddamned noise; I'd rather sleep on the street than in a hospital. Drug me if I'm in pain and let me die already.

I love medical science. I love being able to look things up and nose around in research articles. Medical science is wonderful. I'm not one of those people who bitch about "Western Medicine" per se, or who thinks alternative medicine is fabulous. But our peculiar three-player medical delivery system, in which all the money extracted has to flow through an insurance company before it reaches any caregiver, and runs through multiple curtains of obfuscation and profit-taking before it gets there, does not thrill me. And it would be lovely if I had somehow had back some of the $500 to $800 per month I've been paying, decade after decade, for medical services probably worth $5,000 in total. Seriously: it's hundreds of thousands of dollars I've paid into this system. I could find a use for a few hundred thousand extra dollars.

I probably won't post this: there's not really any point, and it sounds too like a certain sort of right-wing yapping that I don't want to encourage. I'm not thinking clearly enough, perhaps, about all the unknown unknowns. The number of ills that can befall a person is truly astonishing, and I might well wake up grateful in a hospital bed tomorrow morning.

But I am still surly. Even if the scrambled eggs and home fries this morning made really a nice change from boiled eggs and oatmeal. I just want everything to hold still long enough to lose that goddamn inch or two from my waist. I don't want to spend my time chasing rather remote chances of colon disease when I'm staring down the barrel of quite likely cardiovascular disease. Living long enough to get colon cancer would really be something of a feat, given my history and my family history. Something I could be proud of.

My Fiftieth Birthday Present

The Reader is Warned: this post is all about my bowels. No spiritual revelations, effusive poetry, or lyrical descriptions of massage here. Feel free to skip.

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I watched, on the monitor, the endoscope nosing its way up my colon. The surprising thing was how colorful it all was. It had a little spritzer, and it would occasionally wash away a patch of bright yellow scum to reveal the pink, rose, or red surfaces. Along came a polyp, like a little skin tag, and a black tongue snaked out into view and bit it off. It was like that movie, long ago -- Fantastic Voyage, was it? Except the graphics were much better.

I'd asked them to go light on the anesthetic, so I remember it all, though it has a dreamy quality.

While waiting for it to start I was impressed -- as I often am, in hospitals -- at how little they knew about how to make the body rest comfortably. It's not rocket science: it's something every massage therapist knows, how to make people comfortable in a resting position. One thing you don't do is leave someone in a semi-recumbant position with their legs stretched out straight in front of them and nothing under their knees for 45 minutes. When I sat up and stretched and sat cross-legged instead, they worriedly came over and asked if I was okay. "Just stretching," I said. They'd given me this blanket folded narrowly, just wide enough to cover my legs; I was apparently expected to half-sit, half-lie there with my legs poking straight out till doomsday, if that was how long it took the doctor to get to me. You couldn't dream up a better position for instilling trigger points in the lower back and anterior neck.

I liked the doctor, when she finally showed up; a young woman with a wry sense of humor, who was happy to accommodate my request to go light on the anesthetic. But oh, dear, those hunched over shoulders.

"Hi! So you're the person who's going to push five feet of optical tubing up my ass!" is one of the things I didn't say. I also didn't say, "hey, I probably don't really need this colonoscopy, but you really need somebody to work on those traps and pecs. Why don't you get on this table instead?" I was very well-behaved. Afterwards she and the nurses said I was a great patient, they wished all patients were like me, which mystified me a bit. I lay there on my side for half an hour and let them get on with their work: surely that's what most people do?

I was surprised by how grumpy and nervous I was about this. Not the procedure itself, but the business of not eating seeds for three days, and then the liquid diet for two days, and the horrible gallon of laxative stuff you have to drink the night before. Almost everything I like to eat, I discovered, has seeds in it. Raspberry seeds in my breakfast jam, cucumber seeds in my lunch salad, pepper seeds in my dinner salsa. It was, however, easy to "avoid consuming red or purple products" (shudder) on the liquid diet days.

There's nothing I have less equanimity about than food. It's downright weird -- given that I've had plenty of food, all my life -- how screwed up I am about it. The levels of anxiety I have when facing any minor restriction to my diet would be appropriate to someone who had faced starvation multiple times: for someone who's lived in dietary luxury all his life, it's really rather repulsive: possibly the thing about myself I am most ashamed of.

So anyway. Now -- having just had my breakfast with raspberry jam -- I am as happy as a buttered clam. I am in my fifties. My "rout of passage rite of passage," as Martha was pleased to call it, is over.