DAVE BIDINI
‘It was just like an episode of The Mentalist’
Last week, it was suggested by my doctor that I have a colonoscopy. “It’s time for a colonoscopy” is the kind of thing guys hear after they become adult men (I’m 51).
Colonoscopies are not a sign of aging so much as they’re a sign of old aging, although it’s all relative. Still, that I felt a certain wariness and trepidation about someone putting something up my bum made me regret that I’d never willingly allowed someone to do this before, laying bare the tepidity of my life, or least that part of it which concerns my bum.
Mulling over the general state of my colon, I became nostalgic for all of the synthetic things I’d sent down there: flour-bag sized quantities of Sweet Tarts and Rockets; 7,043 slices of 3 a.m. pizza slathered in cheese and meat sources; a river of Freshie, Wink and Mountain Dew sodas; a cannon of marshmallows.
The doctor told me he’d be scouting around my insides with a camera. This came as thrilling news, partly because I discovered that the camera would be very small, and partly because it conjured memories of a lot of fine shrink-themed art: Fantastic Voyage; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; episodes of Futurama and SCTV and The Incredible Shrinking Dickies album by The Dickies, in which the band is pictured being attacked by a pencil. It was also hard not to behold the wonder of having a small lens inserted from below, intended to broadcast my colon to the procedure room like an episode of The Mentalist.
I taxied to the hospital and sat among two other 50-plus men, each of us wondering what kind experience awaited beyond the curtain. One of the fellows was a former CFL football player, which eased my default instinct to cower in fear lest I embarrass myself in front of this iron-souled man, who, without prompting, lifted his gown to reveal scars where his knees had been replaced. The message was clear: as far as procedures are concerned, that it was merely to snoop around was mild as far as things doctors could be required to do to your body.
We were called one by one, and within moments, a nurse was laying me on a gurney. She rolled me to a hallway beyond the procedure room. At this point, I felt, if fleetingly, the pride of responsibility, having actually followed the advice of my doctor to voluntarily submit to this sort of thing while knowing that 90% of colon cancers can be trumped by early detection. My sense of reverie and self-importance, however, was eclipsed the moment my nurse entered the procedure room. Beyond the door, I heard her tell the doctor, “Another colon out there,” diminishing my corporeal being to a single body part, although I suppose I’ve been called worse parts.
I was rolled into the bright room and exchanged pleasantries with my pleasant colonoscopist while an IV was planted into my wrist. Afterwards, me and the CFL player laid side by side, gurney to gurney, and made stupid jokes using a language we’d only just invented. In the end, my ordeal wasn’t so ordeal-y and my colonoscopy was over before it began. Just like The Mentalist.