What I Figured Out at My First Colonoscopy

The best part about it was the sweet biscuits and tea.

I like to think I handled the procedure well but I don’t know. I fell asleep moments after I was introduced to my doctor. Struggling to make jokes in Portuguese, he smiled and said, “Okay, you sleep now.” Off I journeyed seconds after he attached the tube to the small, hungry vile under hidden from view on the back of my hand. 

In the split second I had before a deep, all-consuming sleep sucked me under, I thought to, “Man, maybe Michael Jackson was onto something.” I have never slept well in my life — not ever. Many nights as a child were spent lying in bed listening to a house full of snoozing siblings and a wildly-snoring father. Going to bed has always been for a form of punishment and continues to be one, so today’s brief journey on a magic carpet — with my legs pulled up toward my chest and a hole in the back of yellow pajama-like pants — was somewhat of a treat.

But like I said, there was a hole in the back of my pajamas and two women and an old doc standing around me armed with, well, you know, a small hose with a camera attached to it (enough about that).

“Why are you doing this, do you have suspicions that something is wrong?”

“Nope,” I said proudly, “because I have to…just to make sure all is okay.”

“So a screening. Okay. That’s good.”

Sleep.

“Please wake up, B, wake up. Come on.” Standing before me was the young, pretty medical assistant who had wheeled me into the procedure room 40 minutes before (20 for the procedure and 20 to let me nap a bit, I must have had a deep look of content on my face). 

In the prep instructions they give you before arriving, on every page they put in bold letters: You will not be able to drive. Someone must be waiting for you to take you home. Somehow that warning got stuck in my subconscious because like Frosty the Snowman had his pat phrase when he came to life (“Happy Birthday”), on my return to consciousness the first words I spoke as I processed who was offering me food next to my bed, “Can I have my car keys, please?” 

“Oh no, I am sorry. That’s impossible,” she said sweetly. The thing is, I don’t own a car. Seemingly refreshed, I started laughing at my “funny.” She also missed my joke when I requested another pair of pajamas/medical pants without a hole in them. She did smile at that one, though. 

As I sat there eating my “Marie biscuits” — seen above — and sipping on the best cup of tea I maybe had ever had — my pre-colonoscopy diet was making all foods seems so much tastier! — I gave a “bullshit” rating to about 70 percent of all movies and TV shows which show people ripping out IVs and then running down hallways fighting their way to freedom. The grogginess was so intense that I felt I was buried up to my head in sand.

Slowly, as I noisily sipped and chomped, the tide receded. The urge to drop backwards and sleep more dissipated. I figured soon enough they would be pushing me out of that delightful little curtained-off bed and make me return to reality, so I savored every morsel of Maria.

Another thought flashed by me and veered its head toward my consciousness. 

“Was I snoring?” I yelled out from my cove. The pleasant girl in her mint green uniform peaked her head in and informed that I wasn’t. (Michael Jackson, I thought. A night with no snoring. Wow!).

Before I could process the horror that would become the pop star’s life and how his desire to sleep turned into a deadly addiction, the aspects of propofol which untether thoughts and let them fly as they were “extras” in the Wizard of Oz tornado scene, led to think that it is precisely that state of consciousness that people suffering from dementia experience — kind of present, kind of absent, occasionally you can let a lucid, even humorous observation fly but as the torrent of everything zips to and fro and your struggle to catch up to the thoughts from now and long ago, the breaks you take from that exhausting cannonball run slowly become longer and longer until you fall back onto the bed and your eyes reflect “do not disturb.”

Fortunately for me, I was extracting myself from that fog, but I got a glimpse of what maybe my grandmother was experiencing — my aunt, and so many others I have known who vanished into their inner tornadoes. My grandmother would be completely quiet, then say something completely out of the blue and then a second later a perfectly lucid thought or observation would sneak out. If my wife had heard me ask for my car keys, would think that maybe I was confused and “lost.” I was joking and I am not even sure how I was — it just happened.

It makes me wonder if some of the off-the-wall stuff my grandmother said in her final, bed-ridden years were just attempts at humor — God love her.