I Was Robbed

I wanted to see the inner workings of my colon. Kind of like caving from worry side out. The doctor assured me it was a mild sedative, to make me relax. The last thing I remembered was looking at the hugely magnified texture of the thin blanket covering my ass. Interesting.

And then some faded mumbling. The doctor telling me he found one polyp and that he removed it. Something about testing and seeing me in three years. How about ten?

It was warm under the blankets and I didn’t budge. Except for the farting. I remembered the nurse, Mary, said as soon as I did that I could have a drink. Alone in the room I opened one eye. Just a little. At the end of the roll away table was a Styrofoam cup and straw. If I can just get that right hand out – the one leashed to the IV – I might be able to drag the table close enough to snag the cup. In came the nurse.

“Are you passing gas?”

“Like a balloon at John McCain’s victory party”.

She mustered a puzzled look. “Okay, then. You may have some water.”

My thirst matched the volume of liquid I passed late yesterday evening and throughout the night. Even a Desert Flower needs a little rain every once in a while.

“So, everything was cleaned out?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Good,” I confessed a screw up in the preparation. Instead of guzzling 64 ounces of prep liguid in 8 ounce dosages ever 15 minutes I drank the dosage over the course of 8 hours. One glass every hour. Right down. No bloating.” It was an error on my part discovered after the fact. For two weeks I read the preparation instructions but wrote one hour increments in the margin and that was what I followed, checking off each step beginning last week with no more iron supplements.

“Well, that’ll work.” she replied.

“So why bloat up on a gallon of liquid?”

“Takes too much time.”

That it did. By midnight there wasn’t much left inside or on the roll of toilet paper. I managed to snooze a little ignoring the urge to disturb the cats and rush off to the bathroom. At 6 AM, my last opportunity for liquids before the 6:30 cut off. was missed when I got involved on my computer. Time slipped away in the darkness. Tea turned cold. By 7 AM I had sipped about a half a cup.

Dad, designated driver, dropped me off at the main entrance of the Saratoga Hospital, where two red coated valets stepped out to the curb and opened the door. Just like some fancy hotel. I complimented the young men on their fancy jackets, but gave them no tip. Dad wished me luck and drove Booter, meowing in the back seat, to the ophthalmologist in Latham. I stepped into the hospital where I hadn’t been a patient since the fourth grade, although I don’t remember what for. I just remember playing hangman with Mom. I wasn’t very good at that game.

In the entrance ten people stood in line at that registration window. Oh boy. I stepped to a small information podium where I verified my need to go through this intake process. The lady, named Elaine wore velvet reindeer antlers and a felt Santa helper hat.

“What are you here for?”

“Colonoscopy.”

“Oh no. You can go directly upstairs.” Like a good elf she referred to her list, found my name, checked it twice. “Oh yes, Ms. Perez. There you are.” Elaine volunteered as my personal escort and off we went to sojourn the ubiquitously wandering hallways of the hospital. We rode a maze of elevators entering on one side and exiting on the other. She pointed out which room my procedure would take place.

A lost-in the-woods feeling settled over me. “I guess I should pay attention to where I’m going. Or will you come and get me when it is all over?"

“Oh no. One of the staff will bring you down in a wheel chair.” Dollar signs spun before me.

About this time I began to think of my last hospital procedure. Micronesia. Peace Corps. Third World. But I never saw any M&M’s on the floor, geckos clinging to the ceiling or cats busily scurrying through the ward, tails down, on the defense.

“It’s this your first?”

Coming back to the present, I thought Is this kind of like having a baby? “Yes, I’m a virgin.”

“Here we are,” she proudly chirped as one antler began to droop. Elaine led me into a very crowded waiting room. This is going to take forever. She shook my hand and wished me luck. That’s twice in a span of twelve minutes.

“Merry Christmas, Elaine.”

The receptionist handed me a clipboard with instructions to carefully review my file. The insurance carrier, employer and next of kin were all wrong. It would have been perfect if I had still been in the Peace Corps and Mom was still alive. After updating the forms I ducked into the bathroom. That constant “feel like I need to go feeling” wouldn’t go away. Honestly, there was nothing left.

Nurse Mary escorted me to the prep room. Behind a drawn curtain I learned the man next door was having an Achilles tendon repaired and across the aisle a lady debated a spinal tap. Go for the knock out punch, never-know-you-died drug. As I stood naked in the cubical I turned and looked out the window. Across the parking lot, the field of snow and the new Radiology Center. Could someone be looking at me with a pair of binoculars? Man, my tan line is nearly faded and my ass itches. Cold dry weather of the Northeast. I threw on my robe, pulled on the socks and jumped under the thin blanket.

Mary gabbed away while she tucked a spa warm blanket around me. So far so good. She yakked about friend who came from a family in Italy who owns a spring and bottling plant. Her friend’s mother had been abducted by a well-off man, thirty years her senior. Well-off, but clearly a pig. She was seventeen at the time and the man raped her. Pregnant and disgraced her family forced her to marry the swine and have the baby. After two years of abuse, she fled leaving her son. She hid fearing her family would make her return to the man. He eventually died. She never saw her son again. Other things happened (reunited with her brothers, remarried, other kids, big villa. Now her friend flies to India to do a Zen-Dali-Lama thing. I think this was about where I feel asleep.

It felt like nothing happened and I got robbed of virtually spelunking my insides.