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I have a doctor, otherwise known as a primary care physician, and he has a laissez-faire attitude towards matters regarding my health. For example, my cholesterol had been ramping higher for years, and it was only on my suggestion that he prescribed a statin. Likewise, I reached age 48 without anything resembling a recommendation for a colonoscopy, so I thought I’d bring it up during my last appointment. I suggested doing one of those Cologuard-thing tests. You’ve probably seen the commercials, with that Q*Bert-looking talking box trying to persuade people to send poop through the mail. I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of sending human shit through the postal system pretty funny, and I don’t know how Exact Sciences persuaded the government that this would be a good idea, but three cheers to them.

I got the box in the mail and inspected the contents. There was a small bowl that was to be suspended in a white plastic apparatus that hooked onto the sides of your toilet. The goal: crap in the bowl. This was going to be harder than it looked. The bowl was about six inches in diameter, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve never had any practice in aiming your poop. There’s also a limit as to how much you can poop. Basically, they want one small turd, which means that you have to poop just a little bit and pinch it off. That’s unpleasant—the last thing you want is an inchoate poop—it doesn’t exactly leave you satisfied. I managed to do that reasonably well, but I succeeded in drydocking the turd to the side of the six-inch bowl. At this point I was a little stuck, because you’re supposed to pour some magic solution into the bowl with the turd, and I guess the shipping and handling process mixes it all up on the way to the lab. But the poop was stuck to the side, mocking me. I had to somehow flick it off the side of the bowl with something—but what? A fork was bad, for reasons that should be obvious. I hunted around for a cheap plastic pen, but couldn’t find one, and I didn’t want to sacrifice one of my good pens by sticking it in poo. I settled on a plastic straw that I had tossed in the garbage the day before. I don’t make a habit of playing in my own shit, and by this point, the smell was getting to me, and the gag reflex set in while I was trying to scrape the crap off with the straw. I poured in the solution, packaged it up, and took it to the UPS store the next day. There’s no doubt that it was a Cologuard box, with the Q*Bert guy printed on the side of it, so the UPS clerk and I both knew what was in there—a brown trout. Not one of my better moments.

Anyway, a few weeks went by, and I had long since forgotten the Cologuard incident. I was working in New York as an intern for Bloomberg Opinion, when I got a call from my doctor’s office. They said that the Cologuard test result was positive, and that they’d be calling back to schedule a colonoscopy. They hung up. Positive for what? Colon cancer? At this point I’m freaking out a bit, and making funeral plans, thinking about who I am going to invite and what type of coffin I will get. I learned later that positive results are fairly common, due to polyps and whatnot, as well as false positives. I felt a bit better, but I wasn’t too sure about the colonoscopy. A friend of a friend of a friend died during a colonoscopy. She wasn’t exactly healthy, but still. Medical errors are fairly common.

What bothered me was the interminable delay in scheduling the colonoscopy. If there really was a possibility of colon cancer, shouldn’t there be some sense of urgency? The closest appointment was in two months, and I was going to have to get it at Georgetown hospital, which has many 1-star reviews on Yelp. South Carolinians will understand the context—Georgetown is a cute little town but significantly economically depressed, and I would not expect that it would have the highest standards of medical care. But 45,000 colonoscopies are conducted every day nationwide, and I figured they had a low probability of screwing it up.

I had an appointment for a consult a few weeks before the actual procedure, where they gave me the instructions on the prep. I’m not sure why the consult was necessary—they could have easily just emailed me the instructions. It was a 5-minute talk, and they probably billed my insurance company $3,000. I looked at the instructions—nothing to eat all day. Take 2-4 Dulcolax tablets in the morning, then mix an entire bottle of Miralax (!) with 60 ounces of Gatorade and drink that in the afternoon. The morning of the prep, I woke up with diarrhea, so I had a head start. My butt started puking about two hours after the Dulcolax tablets. I don’t want to even go into what happened after I took the Miralax and Gatorade. Sure enough, by the end of the day, the bowel movements were clear as Poland Spring. I had to get up a couple of times in the middle of the night to finish the job. My wife made me wear an adult diaper, just in case.

One of my major concerns about the colonoscopy was the anesthesia. I had only had anesthesia one other time in my life, in 2013, when I had knee surgery. When I came to in the recovery room, all the nurses were giving me dirty looks. Something deep from my subconscious came out spontaneously and offended everyone in the room. My chaperone for the colonoscopy was my mom, and I told her under no uncertain terms that she was to cover my mouth when I woke up, because there was no telling what I would say. I wondered if anyone had been arrested for anything they had said coming out of anesthesia, like, if they had confessed to any crimes. I thought about looking it up, but decided not to go down that rabbit hole.

My arrival time at the hospital was scheduled for 10:30am. This was less than ideal—I didn’t eat the day before, and I woke up pretty hungry. I didn’t actually get into the exam room until about 11:30 or so. By this point I was hungry enough to eat something from Subway. I undressed, changed into a hospital gown, and got in bed. The nurse, a big-boned woman named Mary Madison asked me if I wanted warm blankets—yes—my body temperature was plummeting from a lack of food. She shoved a 20-gauge needle in my right hand and hooked me up to a blood pressure monitor. I was a little nervous—my blood pressure was running a bit high. This absolutely felt like a hospital. Because it was a hospital. If you’ve ever seen a porno where a guy gets it on with a nurse in a hospital, that is absolutely not possible. There is nothing sexy about a hospital.

At this point the anesthesia nurse comes in—tall, black hair, pale blue eyes. She’s explaining to me that they’re putting me on Propofol. I’m not really paying attention—I’m looking at the blue eyes. She tells me that there are sometimes complications from the anesthesia, but they are rare, and hands me a waiver to sign, full of microscopic print. I’m not reading this thing, not with an IV sticking out of my hand. She tells me that there is one person ahead of me in line, so I will have to wait about 30 minutes. After a half hour, I am wheeled into the room where it all goes down. I’m sort of disconnected from the idea that I’m going to have about 22 feet of fiber optic cable shoved up my ass. She pumps the magic potion into my hand, and tells me that there will be a burning sensation in my arm. I’m just looking at her Zooey Deschanel eyes—I figure if I am going to die under anesthesia, her eyes are the last thing on earth I want to see. And the next thing I know, I am waking up in the exam room.

The doctor comes in and gives me the news. I had four polyps, and two were quite large. One was 14 millimeters and one was 16 millimeters. I ask him if the big polyps are more likely to be cancerous. Yes, he says, but they will send them off to the lab and I will hear something in 10 days. This is the point at which I would dive headlong into Google and estimate my probability of survival. But I decide not to worry about it—one day at a time. This was the point of getting the Cologuard test to begin with, right? To catch problems early, so I don’t end up like Chadwick Boseman.

I have a lot of shit I have left to do on this planet. Besides, dying of colon cancer is a really boring way to go. I’d rather get swallowed by a 30-foot python.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: Ministry – Thieves. The hardest thing I could possibly listen to in high school. My buddies and I used to put this on and beat the shit out of each other.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to whoever you like.