Green Marmot Vexed By An Hundred Sandwich

One of the most interesting things you will ever go through is a colonoscopy, although this is hearsay since I went through mine passed out cold. From what I am told, I woke up midway through the procedure (I have no conscious memory of this whatsoever) facing the monitor where the drama of my lower intestinal tract was showing and loudly exclaimed 'Is that me? Oh wow! That is so cool!' and then fell back asleep. Now I wish I'd been awake enough to remember just what it is I saw that was so interesting. It could have been Amelia Earhart. I'll never know.

As it turns out I have four diverticules. A diverticule is a pocket-like rupture in the tissue of the intestinal lining.

OK fine. You know those big innertubes you use for river rafting, and how they'll get a weak place in the rubber and get this big weird bulgy part that bloops out? That's a diverticule. Or it would be if it were a colon.  So what we should all take away from that analogy* is not to ever use your colon as a form of alternative watercraft.  Of course if you go 'tubing you should bring your colon along; your colon wants to have fun too, but I mean just use the innertube for rafting because that's what it's for. If in the interim you should have cause to use your colon, then for the love of Pete go ashore. It would be gross if you just stayed there floating down the river in your innertube grunting out a dump. Instead, do like we did back when I was a kid in Oregon:  crap in the front seat of someones' car. (Some moron always forgets and leaves their window rolled down.)  It's a hell of a lot more convenient than duckwalking up and down the bank all bent over looking for a restroom since most rivers don't have them. The river will still be there when you get back.

I am given to understand that the major cause of diverticules is too much red meat in the diet, which simply doesn't apply in my case at all. Now as a child of the 60's and 70's of course I ate more than my share of cow, but in my case it had been pressure cooked for three hours beforehand. The result was best described as slippery. I don't see how it could have massed up enough to blow out the colon of a vole, let alone a person. Still, the fact remains. And there's photographic proof.

Oh yes!

I was offered copies of these Polaroids, in fact. Now honest to snot, what the hell would you do with something like that? Send them out as Christmas cards? Which now that I come to think about it I wish I had. They were kind of Christmassy. You know, all red and shiny and kind of....red, and stuff.

Insides are really red, too. I mean, REALLY RED. I figured they would be pale pink. You remember those medical books with the layered transparencies and how the upper intestinal tract was pink and the lower was a tasteful sort of muted puce? Those are wrong. It's red.

When you get a colonoscopy the first thing they do after they pump you full of anaesthetic and you say a bunch of stupid shit that you think is really funny but probably isn't and then pass out, is they take an air hose and pump a couple of blasts of air up there to inflate things. I was kind of appalled at how much inflation they can get by doing that. Jesus CHRIST. Take it from me, if they were feeling frisky they could pack a lot of stuff up there and you'd never have a clue as long as it was stuff like old rubber gloves or margarine. You could probably walk around all damn day just humming a lil' tune and never notice a thing until you took a crap, and then you'd probably scream.

Anyway, once that's done they take that hose out and then stick another different hose up there that has a fiber optic camera in it. It has a little headlight on it too; and what it lights up is shore nuff red, like I've been saying. Shiny, too. And there's all these little red spidery veins all over the place. I was expecting something that looked like raw chitlins. In reality it looks nothing whatsoever like raw chitlins. That didn't bother me as much as you might think it would.

Before all this takes place though you have to drink this liquid laxative called citrate of Manitoba for two days. Man does this stuff clean you out. Much to my surprise it tasted pretty good. Kind of like Squirt soda, appropriately enough. Basically, you should plan on just taking your pants off altogether and sitting on the toilet for that entire couple of days while this stuff does its job since as soon as it goes in, it comes RIGHT OUT. At VELOCITY. And it ain't over 'till the fat lady sings...or in this case, 'till the fat lady shits clear for at least an hour. And the fat lady did. Hell, the fat lady about fucking took the shine off the enamel.

Besides diverticules I had a couple of polyps. This pleased a certain vile, Lovecraftian part of my psyche: Ewwwww polyyyyyypsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

It sounds like something with tentacles and slime that barfs up corrosive acid like those gross deep sea fish that glow in the dark and sneak around at night and lick your steering wheel and go 'wghnnnnn' because they're mutated.  And if you have to have something potentially life-threatening growing in your butt it might as well be something with a cool disgusting name, like 'polyps' instead of something with a lame boring name, like 'toaster'. Think how humiliating it would be to read 'Cause of death attributed to ass toasters' on your death certificate.

Intestinal polyps supposedly can turn into colon cancer. I have no idea how this happens or why. If it were an infestation of things with tentacles and slime that barfs up corrosive acid you could appease them with blood sacrifices, but it's not, which is why they have to inflate your butt and stick a camera up it. Life is a mystery. In any event they stuck ANOTHER thing up there that had an electrified cautery thing and lassoed the polyps and sent a charge through and the polyps went 'PFFFT'. I can't say I was displeased at all. When you consider the fact that this completely obviates the need at some future date to remove several yards of colon, sew your anus shut, and cut a hole in your side so you can shit in a bag, you got to figure you don't have a whole lot to bitch about. The disgusting practical joke potential is, of course, astronomical; but I'll shit in that bag when I come to it.

This procedure takes about an hour, all told. Now that you are finished, when you wake up  you'll know three things immediately:
1.You are completely empty because not having eaten anything for 24 hours will do that to a person.
2. But now, thanks to modern medical science and a small compressor, all that unused storage space now contains the cubic air mass of a military weather balloon and it smells like vaporized ass growths; therefore
3. You are now primed to cut the fart of a lifetime.

And they encourage this!  The nurse who comes in to make sure you aren't dead actually tells you to try as hard as you can to rip ass!  Oh yes! And as soon as you do...for a good two minutes, like five draft horses, a trumpeting bull elephant, plus another elephant that's dead and all bloated up like how they get but then someone threw a rock at it so now it's deflating out this jet of green dead elephant fumes...omg, you will be SO PROUD.  Everybody in the whole building will now know exactly what kind of a procedure you just had, too.  The human body is a miraculous thing, kids.