I just had my first colonoscopy. This is a rite of passage for many people of my age. Kind of the 50-year-old’s version of the Bar Mitzvah, except there’s no band and, instead, you get a camera up your butt. It’s actually a two-step process. Instead of spending months learning your Torah portion and writing some mindless drivel about it, you spend about 24 hours starving and have several rounds of a liquid that makes your colon clean enough to eat off of. (Note the use of a preposition to end the previous sentence. This is the “internets,” after all.) The liquid, by the way, is not nearly as putrid as all the whiners said it would be. Then you go to a nice place with nice people who give you very pleasant medicine to make you unconcerned about the anal probe you are about to experience. You then can watch the examination if you are so inclined, which I definitely was. It was like TV, only it was my colon. I thought the entire process was fascinating. I even liked the purge part, which was disgusting. Better than any fart or poop joke I could think of, because it was real and the sound effects couldn’t be beat (or imitated, except if you are in proximity to a sink with running water). The big dilemma for me was whether I should ever eat again. After all, I was so . . . clean. I am the kind of person who does not wear new clothes for weeks after I purchase them, because — well — they’re so clean! Could I foul my newly pristine colon with food? It was quite a head scratcher, until the nice people at the colon place presented me with a handful of Animal Crackers (after I completed my assigned gas-passing). There were bunnies and owls and all kinds of critter crackers I hadn’t remembered seeing before. Oh well. They were nothing that a few spoonfuls of Metamucil couldn’t fix. Yummy.
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