This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle.
There are times when you wish the commode had a seatbelt.
You spent several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.
After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife took me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I have been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage.
I was thinking, 'What if I spurt on Andy?" How do you apologized to a friend for something like that?
Flowers would not be enough.
At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said.
Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.
Then a nurse named Edie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Edie was very good and I was already lying down.
Edie, also told me that some people put vodka in their MovePrep.
At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode.
You would have no choice but to burn your house down.
When everything was ready, Edie wheeled me into the procedure room where Andy was waiting with the nurse and an anesthesiologist I did not see the 17,000 foot tube but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere, I was nervous, seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist begin hooking something up to the needle in my hand.
There was music playing in the room, and the song was "Dancing Queen" by Abba, I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, "Dancing Queen" has to be the least appropriate.
"You want me to turn it up" said Andy, from somewhere behind me. "Ha ha," I said. And then it was time, the moment I have been dreading for more than a decade.
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.
Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that it was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors.
I have never been prouder of an internal organ.
The author is a Pulitzer Prize winning humorist columnist for the Miami Herald.