Cancer Screening

I had to have a Colonoscopy the other day; not the greatest experience in my life, to be sure – but I have to be honest and say that it really wasn’t all that bad, either. For the most part, I wasn’t even there. Just go in, go to sleep, wake up a couple hours later, and go home.

Of course, the prep is the bad part. That starts the day before and involves a lot of quality time on the toilet. My doctor gave me a list of various laxatives to buy and a schedule to follow outlining exactly how to prep for the procedure. I weighed myself in the morning, then again that night after enduring the prep – and found that I lost 5 pounds that day!

The really bad part was the fasting. I have plenty of reserves, of course, so my body was not starving by any means. I really wasn’t even that hungry. But going without my regular scheduled feedings is apparently a major trigger for my migraines – I had a SCREAMING headache that whole day.

The instructions for prep say that you should not eat any solid foods that whole entire day – so you’re thinking “ok, 24 hours without food = I can do that.” but what it really means is that your last meal is dinner the night BEFOR the prep day – and your next meal isn’t until they finish the procedure the day AFTER the prep day. So, figure my last food intake was on Monday at 9:00 PM and the next food intake wasn’t until Wednesday at 2:00 PM = that means I went on a 35 hour fast!

So, yeah. My head hurt. A lot. And I wasn’t allowed to take any medication for it, either. By the time I got to the surgical center, I’d say my pain was somewhere around a 9 or a 10.

The procedure itself was a success, they tell me. They found and removed two pollyps, wich the labs later called Pre-Cancerous. The nurses and doctors were all very friendly and made sure I understood what was going on. My arm was farily cooperative: they only had to poke me twice to find a vein good enough for the IV. I now have a LOVELY bruise, with multiple colors ranging from yellow to green to purple to black, where they tried and failed the first time.