Gearing Up For The Big C

When I was a kid, let's say around 10, I wanted to grow up to be a major league baseball player. Other guys I knew desired to be firemen or policemen. I suspect we picked those possible professions because they seemed exciting plus we hadn't expanded our horizons to be knowledgeable about the real world.

Every so often I'll be speaking to someone about their profession and then ask, "what prompted you to choose that one". I will, once again, on this coming Tuesday have this opportunity.

You see, I'm going to have a colonoscopy, my fifth one. It's not so much the idea of going through the procedure that bothers me but the preparation involved; the pre-enema glug if you know what I mean. After all, I'll be drugged out of existence while Herr Doktor searches for the dreaded polyps. Some folks like The Queen had one of these probe finders ten years ago. The result is she can go ten years without another. Yours truly hit the jackpot three years past by having seven snipped away. Since it's number five my hopes of getting off scott free are next to nil.

I vividly remember my first colonoscopy. It was in a medical office just west of the Ohio State Univ. campus. Gosh, that was 20 years ago. I would like to say I have a good memory to retain all the facts; time of day, weather, the ride home, what I did that afternoon, but there's a reason for my excellent recall. Halfway through my sedative wore off and I screamed like a banshee.

So, my question to the doctor on Tuesday at 9 a.m. will be this: Since I wanted to be a ball player when I grew up what prompted you to want to grab a hot poker and shove it up somebody's rectum thirty or forty times a day?

It's a fair question