Friday, July 8, 2016

From colon to semi-colon, or losing weight is easy when you don't eat

I have a new diet plan that will enable you to lose 10-15-20 pounds in just a week. I call it the “semi-colon” diet.

Allow me to explain.

Everyone knows (or should) that at age 50, a man (and I can only speak to men’s health here) should get his first colonoscopy.

Everyone should also know that a lot of men – myself included – don’t like the idea of anyone fooling with that part of our bodies (as Dave Barry put it so famously here: "A journey into my colon - and yours". Google it).

It’s not just the idea of drinking so much stuff the day before and knowing how that means your evening will be spent (although I can think of plenty of ways I’d prefer spending an evening than locked in the “water closet”). It’s also the idea of a stranger - or anyone, for that matter - running something up my backside.

So I found ways to avoid this for years. I have always been rather genetically blessed with good health. I have not spent a night in a hospital as a patient since I was in the fourth grade (they used to keep you in when they took your tonsils out, and gave you all the ice cream you could eat afterward which, like most doctor’s promises, sounded a lot better before the surgery than afterward). Again, not thanks to my lifestyle or exercise or eating habits (I have spent a lot of years on the road, eating things that come from a drive-thru window) I have been blessed with healthy blood pressure, low cholesterol, healthy organs. I don’t take any medication for anything, I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs (heck, my wife has to practically force me to take two Tylenol for the rare headache).

Then I could make the excuse of the last five years of the rather crazy life we led, with me living and working during the week on the coast while my wife stayed behind in Birmingham or in Memphis or St. Louis taking care of her father.

But the truth is, I just didn’t want anyone messing around with my backside.

Until this year. My doctor had just given me my first physical in three years, and pronounced me ridiculously healthy for someone with my propensity for fried goods, sweet tea, and Varsity Hot Dogs with onion rings. But he also said, “You’ve really got to get a colonoscopy. It’s way past time.”

And my friend Gary Palmer, kept on me, challenging my manhood (wait: challenging my manhood because I didn’t want someone to stick something up my butt?), telling me if he could do it so could I.

And another friend went in for a colonoscopy and found he had cancer which, thankfully, they took care of.

So I surrendered my dignity and self-esteem and set up the appointment. It wasn’t going to be so bad, I kept telling myself. You eat some broth for lunch (I didn’t even know you could get ‘broth’ except in a children’s story set in the Middle Ages), then spend the rest of the day drinking enormous amounts of Gatorade mixed with Metamucel acompanied by Dolcolax. Then I got up at 5 a.m. to be at the hospital at 6 and was the first patient of the day. I figured to be out by noon, sleep away the afternoon, and we had invited some friends from church over for a cook-out that evening.

Instead, I woke up to my doctor telling me they’d found a “mass” in my colon that he couldn’t get out, so I should stay over for surgery (“since you’re already cleaned out”) the next day at which time they’d remove “8-10 inches” of my colon.

I appreciate my friend Jack who said, “Well, if they miss and take 8-10 inches from somewhere else, you’ll finally be normal like the rest of us.” I have no idea what he meant by that. I swear. Or how he would even know.

Remember now, I hadn’t eaten anything since a bowl of “broth” the day before at lunch (which I got at Chick-fil-A by straining their chicken soup as best I could). So now we’re at 24 hours without eating. Surgery was set for the next afternoon – it ended up being around 4 p.m.

That was another 24 hours with only ice chips.

The good news is, they did the surgery. It was not cancer, although I was told in another 3-6 months it would have become cancer. I was left with four interesting scars on my belly, and wound up spending a full week in the hospital.

Now, my wonderful wife has spent too many nights in the hospital over the last few years in particular. I have stayed with her (as she did with me, by the way). I used to think, “I could use a night or two in a hospital, reading, watching TV, just relaxing.” But like those promises of unlimited ice cream when I was a kid, the idea was much better on the front side than the back end (groan – another bad reference).

I am a miserable patient. I was grouchy. I was sick. I went six days without anything other than ice – and two bites of jello which I couldn’t keep down. And then there was an attempt by the hospital staff to “intubate” me, which is run a tube thought my nose down into my stomach to drain fluids and stuff. After three unsuccessful attempts, I suggested they just water-board me instead. A doctor came by and told me he couldn’t force me to let them intubate me, but if I kept throwing up there was a good chance I’d die. I said, “give me two hours and if I throw up again, we’ll discuss it.” By sheer force of will, I absolutely refused to throw up for the next 24 hours.

Afterward, everyone agreed that intubation is pretty horrible, except one intern told me they knew of a doctor who would do it to himself there in the hospital room to show patients how “easy” it was to do. My guess is that guy came from a family of sword-swallowers.

I am so bad as a patient that my wife told me she was worried about me. “What happens when you get old and I’m not around to take care of you? Do you think your children are going to want to care for you when you’re like this?”

Good point. So I now have to make sure I die before she does.

End result (get it: “end” result)? I finally ate some hospital turkey and my doctor said if I could keep that down, I could go home. (All other functions had started returning by that point.)

So they took a chunk out of my colon, prompting my youngest to call me a "semi-colon." Get it? Funny kid, right? Yeah, I was laughing so hard I threw up.

I went to the doctor again this week. At my physical before all this happened, he’d told me I should lose 10 pounds. I started hearing that about 35 pounds ago. Turns out, I lost about 20, which caused me to sneer "You happy now?" at him. (I told you I am a miserable patient).

I took the next week and went to the beach with my family, who did put up with me while I slept, read a lot of books, managed to play a game of miniature golf, and went to eat one night at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet where, for $32 dollars a person, I ate about $4.25 cents worth of food.

Here’s the real point, if you’ve stayed with this story for this long.

Get the colonoscopy. It’s easy. It’s relatively painless. And it could actually save your life.

It would be stupid to die because an over-inflated sense of privacy keeps you from allowing a doctor to inflate your colon like a beach ball and then run 17,000 feet of tubing up your bum.

If you’re 50 and they tell you it’s time, do it. If you’re over 50, as I am, you really, really need to get it done. If I had done this five years ago, they may have been able to get the ‘mass’ out before it became a mass and didn’t require further surgery and my family wouldn’t know just how awful of a patient I am.

Now, I’ve just got to convince my children that I won’t be like this when I’m old.

2 comments:

  1. It was so good to see you and your better halves at the beach. I am glad you will be around awhile d/t preventative medicine. Good advice to get the colonoscopy .. from one who had one that got complicated but made a good life change as a result... on the road to Seattle now!

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  2. Congratulations on becoming a semi-colon in a non-malignant manner. Hope you enjoy many more future colonoscopy procedures. ;-)

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