The 19 Stages of Your Colonoscopy

CW: feces, bumholes, Stouffer's mac and cheese

Just a plain regular cozy nap nbd!

Look at you, scheduling your colonoscopy like a boss! Because you’re supposed to, and you did. Here’s what you can expect.

1.     They’ll send you a prep form in the mail and you’ll bring it to the drugstore to outfit yourself. You will need two (2) 8.3-ounce bottles of Miralax, even though what they sell there is one (1) 17.9-ounce bottle. Do you need to measure and discard 1.3 ounces? You don’t know. You will also need four (4) 32-ounce bottles of Gatorade, even though they only carry 28-ounce bottles. What are you—a mathematician?

2.     Speaking of Gatorade: “ANY COLOR!” the form will promise exuberantly, before adding, parenthetically, “Except orange, red, blue, or purple.” You will tick through Roy G. Biv in your head to figure out what’s left, and what’s left is yellow and green. Pink maybe? But is pink the same as red? And there’s white, but it’s cloudy? Either way, “ANY COLOR!” will not feel like an honest framing of what’s possible.

3.     “I know what you’re doing,” someone will say colonoscopally as they eyeball your basket in line, and you will laugh.

4.     On the evening before your appointment, one hour after your gastroenterology practice closes for the day, think to double-check the time. “Your appointment is at 8:00 AM” the form will say. There will be an asterisk. When you find the other asterisk at the bottom of the page, it will say: “Check in one hour before your procedure is scheduled to begin.” The scheduling person will have written “8:00 AM” here at the asterisk. Is check-in one hour before 8:00? Or is 8:00 when you should check in, and the procedure is scheduled to begin at 9:00? You will not know.

5.     Meanwhile you will have taken the four (4) bisacodyl tablets and drunk half the solution (64 or 56 ounces of Gatorade with either 8.3 or 8.95 ounces of Miralax dissolved in it) and, it is safe to say, you will be winning at the game of shitting your guts out.

6.     Yes, you will feel nauseated. In lieu of Saltines, just go ahead and settle your stomach with a nice big swig of an approved CLEAR LIQUID, say black coffee or one of the two permitted colors of Gatorade.

7.     While you’re chatting with him over the phone, your dad will say, “You’re doing the old-fashioned kind? These days I just pop a turd into the mail!” In the weeks to follow, as you bring in your bills and J. Crew catalogues from the postbox, this utterance will haunt you.

8.     Obviously you’re not talking about a super-hazy IPA, but might beer be considered a clear liquid? (No.)

9.     The form will tell you to drink the second half-gallon of solution “in the morning, 1:00 AM or earlier, but not before 10 PM.” You will question everything you thought you knew about the word morning.

10.  You will poop and poop! You will poop like a house afire—only not like the actual house afire. More like the firefighters brandishing hoses to douse the house, or specifically, like the hoses themselves. Or maybe like the hydrant the hoses are plugged into—or the sewers beneath.

11.  Do you remember the game Poohsticks? Winnie the Pooh played it with Christopher Robin and Eeyore: They stood on a bridge and dropped a stick into the upstream water, then looked to see whose stick came out the other side of the bridge first. This game is kind of like that, but you can play by yourself: Take a sip of Gatorade and see if you can shit it out before you even swallow it.

12.  For the first time in your life, your sense of hearing (such as it is) will not be able to cue you as to whether you are peeing or pooping. This will be unnerving to say the very least.

13.  Your butthole! My god, your poor unsung butthole. It will be down there, squeezing itself shut like a rosy little fist against the tides of Gatorade and Miralax. If you don’t shit your bed (and god knows you might) it’s because your sphincter is a fucking hero.

14.  When it’s all over, your poop should be a clear, pale yellow, the instructions will say. Define “clear.” Define “pale yellow.” Nobody online will seem to know, and people on Reddit will be wondering too—lots and lots of people—so at least you won’t be alone.

Good job, itsjustmeiguessidk!

15.  In the morning you will check in at the appointed time—either 8:00 or 9:00—sheepishly, because you will know that they will know that you were up all night pooping. The nurses will try to console you with blankets hot from the warmer, and, if you’re being honest, you will actually be consoled by this.

16.  Right before they put you to sleep, they’ll ask you to sign a waiver. It’s the usual—You might die and that’s totally fine!—but when you joke that you’re granting them permission to mock your bumhole while you’re asleep, nobody will laugh and your last thought as the anesthesia kicks in will be Awkward!

17.  When you wake they’ll give you a juice box and some graham crackers and ask how your nap was, and the ironic fact that you suddenly feel like a preschooler while you’re experiencing the hallmark of middle age will not be lost on you. Also, you haven’t slept that soundly in literal decades.

18.  When you get home, someone will microwave Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese for you, because even though you will feel as though you’ve been probed by adult aliens, you will still crave your childhood comfort food. Also because you were sensible enough to shack up with a mensch.

19.  Much later, you will notice that you have a pair of weird snaps stickered to your chest. Nobody will have mentioned this to you. Did they have to shock your heart back to life while you were under? (They did not.) But you are lucky to be alive—my god, you are so, so lucky—and you will know it.