A friend of mine emailed me one of those humorous things, this time it was Dave Barry’s article on the experience of having a colonoscopy. Apparently, everybody posts these all over the place; go have a read at the link if not a few hundred other webpages with the essay.

I tried to read it aloud to Diane and was reduced to incoherent bouts of laughing several times. The primary experience Dave relates is the day-before cleanout and its inherent horrors, which Dave turns into light humor. Here’s where Dave talks about the colonoscopy itself:

If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.

I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling ‘Dancing Queen, Feel the beat of the tambourine,’ and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.

I think that holds for most people, especially when slightly out of shape people prone to a bit of hypertension go get a coloconoscopy. OK, so I’m slightly out of shape myself, but my blood pressure is a bit on the low end of normal, so the last couple of times I had a colonoscopy, you can erase the bits about the anesthesiologist obligingly making the world go away during the main event. That’s right, I could fill you in on the part Dave could not, but a mere five years remove is not yet enough to turn the recollection humorous. So the one positive benefit one can get from high blood pressure is assurance that they would have little reservation at knocking you out for a colonoscopy, and a positive benefit of total colectomy, like I had, is that I never need another colonoscopy, especially one without anesthesia.