You arrive at the clinic with sweaty palms and a thumping heartbeat. They make you strip and put on a hospital gown with your ass hanging out the back. You mount the paper covered table and hold out your arm. An IV is stuck into any candidate vein. Here is your first hint this is not going to be a quick in-and-out drive-up window procedure.
You wait. Oh wait...the nurse is coming back.
A couple of nurses retrieve you and roll you into the 'theater'. You don't really want to look around because most of the gear is unrecognizable anyway. The MD nods politely, but is in a hurry - he is doing these things all day long and you are not a guest of honor.
Just as the doc finishes a cryptic run-down over what he is gonna do, another nurse plugs your IV into a bottle of 'stuff'. You wake up on the other side of the building with no memory - the last thing you do remember is 'this will be over before you know it'. You are shivering like a trout on a rock beside a mountain stream. You just got violated for a solid 30 minutes by a room full of people running a cable with a camera up your rear and possibly cratering chunks of your intestinal wall. You made it!
Oh did I mention that the real hard part is emptying your bowels of every scrap of whatever you ate up 'till that moment - the night BEFORE? You are expected to show up with your intestines cleaner than the day they were made.
You accomplish this by drinking the most foul tasting plastic-like drink disguised as a lime or orange soda. Then you sit up for half a day and night as close to the toilet as a squirting accident takes to happen. You perch there pondering the next days ordeal, draining yourself like a septic tank truck. The end never seems to come, then suddenly you feel ten-pounds lighter, and plunge into a gut-empty sleep.
The next day arrives and you are ready to jump to step one above.
Why do it? Why pay good money to subject yourself to 'the ordeal'? Because if they find a polyp, and it isn't a cancer, they remove it, all of it, and any others they find. And if there is cancer, you catch it sooner which is always better than later.
That one thing puts you into the 53% of patients that will NOT die from colon cancer - but only if you do it every five or ten years after age 50. That's right, you get to do this a lot.
Welcome to your senior years, folks. Have fun.
