Just get the colonoscopy

Some of it was fear of what they might find. Some of it was laziness, because it isn’t comfortable and no fun and there’s always something else to do. But my dad died of colon cancer and I didn’t want that to be my story too. So I finally went, and it was so much easier than I’d built it up to be in my head. I wrote this to encourage others to just do it.

24 hours before the procedure, I drank 4L of GaviLyte-G split into two tranches. Two liters at 6pm, then up again at 1am to chug the rest. It’s salty, thick, and it doesn’t taste fabulous, and no amount of flavoring really fixes that. I could pound about a liter an hour, and honestly the worst of it was just slurping the stuff down and waiting to poop my brains out. Like clockwork, it methodically cleared me ALL the way out.

My procedure was at 6:30am. We did the whole American healthcare ritual where you hand over your magic numbers and they ask you a ton of questions you already answered. Then I got into a gown, a phlebotomist placed my IV, and I felt the cool stream of saline run through my arm.

I was wheeled into a dark room full of screens and computers. They had me roll onto my side. The anesthesiologist said she added some lidocaine in with the propofol so it wouldn’t sting. I watched her start to push the plunger and felt a warmth crawl up my arm. Not pain, just a scratchy kind of heat. And then I woke up. The doctor told me there was no cancer and that everything looked good.

When the nurse pulled the curtain closed so I could get dressed, I fell apart. I tried to cry quietly so the other people couldn’t hear. There had been so much leading up to that moment, so much anxiety I’d been carrying around without ever really looking at it. And here was the relief of knowing this is not a thing I have to worry about (for right now).

There’s always the version of an experience you expect, and then the one you actually get. I was scared of the outcome, so I let the fear win for a while. Looking back, the procedure itself was nothing. The mental rigamarole I put myself through was the hardest part of the whole experience. The fear was the only part I made unmanageable.

I hope my kids read this someday. I hope you’ve read this far and think, alright, let’s just do it or you get inspired to encourage someone you know who needs to. I’ll go again in a few years, and next time I’ll walk in knowing there was never that much to be afraid of. Taking care of yourself is hard, especially when you’re trying to hold up everything and everyone else at the same time. But if you don’t take care of your foundation, you fall apart.