Against a small part of my ever-diminishing Better Judgment, I've decided to tell you what I did this morning. I had a colonoscopy. This is a procedure that is recommended when you hit age 50 (I'm two years late) wherein a doctor puts a teensy-weensy camera where the sun don't shine and looks around for polyps, tumors and other assorted speed bumps. I got a clean bill of health and I have to tell all my friends: If you've been putting this off because it sounds scary or painful, don't. Much easier than it sounds.
I have lived a somewhat doctor-free life. I told my anesthesiologist that he was only the second anesthesiologist of my life, the first having knocked me out when I was nine and suddenly needed to be appendix-free. That was the last time I ever found myself on a rolling hospital bed before this morning, so it all felt very odd to me — but not terribly unpleasant. Fasting yesterday and chug-a-lugging laxatives was the worst of it. This A.M., I reported to a "surgery center" in Beverly Hills, waited half an hour, filled out thousands of forms, put on one of those humiliating gowns that never quite closes in the back, got in the bed…and that was about it. My second-ever anesthesiologist put me to sleep and the next thing I knew, a pretty nurse was telling me my ride was there and I could get dressed and go. The whole thing took less than ninety minutes but it seemed like ninety seconds and the closest thing to pain occurred when they stuck in the needle for the intravenous drip.
On his last Showtime special, Robert Klein sang a very funny song called "Colonoscopy," which I could not get out of my head all morning. The main line goes, "When I turned 53 / A colonoscopy / Opened up a whole new world to me." I didn't have a whole new world open up this morning but at least I put one concern — the pun is unavoidable, I'm afraid — behind me.
The most interesting episode of the morning did not involve my lower tract. In the waiting room at the Surgery Center, there was a couple that was going through dramatics that would have been considered overacting in the Yiddish Theater. The woman, who was the patient, was in near-hysterics, crying and trembling and saying a lot of sentences that began with, "If I don't make it…" The man was alternately comforting her and snapping at the attendants, asking all sorts of trivial questions and demanding immediate answers. Why couldn't he go into pre-op with her? Why did he have to wait in the waiting room? Why wouldn't he be right outside the operating room? Was the surgeon with whom they had consulted actually going to perform every bit of the procedure himself or would he be sloughing some part of it off on an assistant? Questions like that. Few of the answers he received seemed to reassure him that the folks there at the Surgery Center really knew what they were doing, and at the moment I was called in, he was holding his wife and saying over and over, "Don't worry…I'll be right here every second."
I felt more concerned about them than I was for myself. I said to the attendant who was leading me inside, "The way they're going, he's going to need a doctor, too." The attendant shook her head and said, "She's just in to have a skin cancer removed."