May 2007 - Sincerely Sire Newsletter

                                Got Colonoscopy?

Well, I finally did. No jokes please, but I do have one for you. Posted on the door of my doctor’s office is a cartoon that shows a doctor with his patient. The doctor says to the man, “Okay, so which works better with your schedule, working out three days a week for an hour a day, or being dead 24 hours a day?”

Ever since my doctor told me I should get a colonoscopy, about three years ago, I started making absolutely certain I didn’t.

Then I started seeing the commercials on TV reminding me personally to get a colonoscopy. Have you seen the one where the husband and wife are talking about it over breakfast? The one where the wife says, “It’s just like those blueberries in your oatmeal honey. If they find a polyp they just pluck it right out,” as she snatches a berry from his bowl.

And then my wife, Roe, started telling me I should get one too, but she’s always telling me to do stuff—take out the trash, buy some clothes, get up and get me my coffee, get a haircut, get a colonoscopy, etc. etc. After twenty or thirty years it all starts to sound the same—like freeway noise. You just try to avoid the crashes.

But what finally pushed me over the edge is when my daughter said, “Dad, if you die because you didn’t get a colonoscopy, I am going to be @#$%*!”

So I made like a Nike commercial. The doctor says, okay, you’re going to have to take four of these pills and drink a gallon of this special liquid. I wasn’t worried about the pills, and the gallon of whatever I was supposed to drink didn’t bother me either—shoot, in my younger days I did that lots of times with beer—but let me tell you, this stuff was more powerful than beer. A lot more powerful. It was more like rocket fuel—if I wouldn’t have held on I would have gone into orbit.

The next morning I go to the outpatient place in Newport and they hook me up to the IV. Roe is with me, yawning, bored. I keep waiting for them to put the stuff in the IV that makes you feel good, like you’ve just had a tequila, but they don’t do it. They just roll me into a tiny room with lots of equipment and TV monitors, stick white pads on my chest and squirt something into the clear tube that’s inserted into my arm.

One of the nurses knows me and starts talking real estate. The last thing I remember is the doctor asking me if I had any questions, to which I replied, “No, but thanks for asking.”

The procedure itself took about thirty minutes and they gave me the results as soon as I woke up. One polyp. They had plucked it out just like the berry in the oatmeal. Four days later I got the results of the biopsy—benign, but the doctor said it could have been trouble if not removed.

Over fifty? Got somebody who loves you?

Just do it.

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