Marker

It's interesting how you stop looking forward to things once your age passes the 25 mark.

At 16 or so you get your driver's license. Always a great thing to look forward to.

Then at 18 the politically inclinced get to vote and the independently inclined can legally leave home.

21 is of course the drinking age. And 25 gets you lower car insurance rates.

But after that, the milestones tick off more and more depressing events. 30 signals your official entry into adulthood where childhood antics are no longer cute and you become labeled as an immature and socially inept tard. And turning 40? Yikes.

Then comes 50, and your first colonoscopy.

As much as having a tube stuck 3 feet into your butt sucks, it's better than a slow and painful death from colon cancer. Considering that a well performed colonoscopy can identify early lesions and prevent its progression to cancer, there's really no point in avoiding it. And with the increased awareness in the media (Katie Couric), more people are going through with it.

To make the procedure more tolerable, we do sedate our patients. Most people just sleep through the entire process, and then there are the few that stay partially awake. The sedatives that we use occasionally act like truth serum and patients will reveal some amazing things. (Click here for a previous post about colonoscopy revelations.)

One of my more recent patients was a rather large and scary-ish looking biker dude. He was bald, had scary facial hair, lots of muscles, and looked like his hobby was kicking ass and taking names. But thankfully, he was very pleasant and quite friendly.

The colonoscopy was going very well, my patient appeared to be well sedated and comfortable, and I was about halfway done when all of a sudden he jerks up and screams at the top of his lungs:

"Fuck Jerry! That hurts! I told you I don't like it stuck up that far!"



*Of course, none of us knew who Jerry was... and we didn't ask the patient's wife either.