Oprah doesn't know what she's talking about

You know those pieces of unsolicited commercial emails you get that tell you that you, too, can lose more than twenty pounds using Oprah's method? This is accomplished, they say, by buying some concoction that flushes all that sludge from your intestines.

Well, it ain't gonna work. Save your money.

Yesterday (and through the night), I flushed (flushed, and flushed again) every bit of sludge from my intestines.  This morning I was 2.4 pounds lighter than the previous morning. I'm guessing that most of that was from dehydration.

This morning I had my first full-length colonoscopy.

Five years ago, I had a doctor who said that a flexible sigmoidoscopy every five years and annual fecal occult blood tests statistically have the same chances of detecting colon cancer as colonoscopies done every ten years. The sigmoidoscopy requires no anesthesia and has fewer risks of damage since it doesn't go as far into the colon. Since I studied statistics in college (I have a degree in math!), I went for the less intrusive tests. (I didn't look into his claim about the statistics but had to believe what he said. He is a doctor, after all.)

That doctor left the group to open a franchise in a cosmetic medicine chain and my new doctor doesn't believe in sigmoidoscopies. (As far as I can tell, my old doctor's laser skin care shop didn't work out. The chain's web site shows only one location in operation.) Five years later it was time to start getting this test.

Yesterday I got to drink water, clear juices, and a couple of liters of prepared MoviPrep. That's nasty stuff. I had a long stare-down with the last glass (the eighth) of the stuff. It was hard to summon the courage to swallow it.

We went in for my 8:30 appointment, filled in the little bit of paperwork and was taken right in. The nurse strapped on the blood pressure cuff and poked in the IV needle. She thanked me for bringing big veins. She told me some of what to expect and said that I wouldn't remember anything after they tell me to "roll onto your left side." She wheeled me into the examination room.

The doctor came in and told me a bit about the procedure and that it would take about half an hour. The nurse put the drug into the IV and told me to roll onto my left side.

No polyps were in there. Come back in ten years.

Jerry took me home before 10:00 and fixed me a toasted sesame bagel and orange juice. He told me that I savored every bite and that I told him that "I'm savoring every bite." This was my first solid food in about 36 hours, after all. I then gently beeped his nose and went to sleep. He told me that I got up from my nap and read the report of my procedure then went back to my nap. I don't remember any of this.

I finally woke up at 2:00 and resumed making lasting memories. Then I napped a lot more.

I didn't get any pictures or videos of the procedure. Instead, you can watch Katie Couric get hers.


I'm glad that's over. The procedure and its weird aftermath weren't unpleasant. The preparation for it was.