Just Took It All

Relax.  It’s only Dulcolax and Miralax.  The prior were small pills, and the latter was a chalky brew I had to add to a half-a-gallon of water and pound down last night.  Today was the other half.  Nasty, certainly.  Nastier on a fasted, empty stomach which nothing to chase it with, but if this is the worst of it . . .  During the morning I had call with Israel and then a call with Thailand and then, sending out one-last-email two or three times we got in the car and headed over the river so I could have my first-ever, colonoscopy. 

 

Before I could, I went to the Vassar Brother’s hospital complex and searched around for a while before finding the right place or an unrelated lower-lumbar Xray I needed to have for the osteopath I visited the week before.  I found the place and kindly, the accommodated me as apparently my appointment wasn’t really till the next day.  A portly lady who confirmed, “No, none of us have android chargers.  We all have iPhones,” showed me where to head to get my backbones photographed.   All along the wall were Hallmark-like paintings of paddle boats on the Hudson which I suddenly became fascinated with, imagining my grandmother’s generation, crossing the mighty Hudson that way in any year before 1925 when they built the Mid-Hudson Bridge. 

 

I’d been over here just two days prior so I knew exactly where to go to visit Dr. Dean’s office.  He’d had me get a Covid test on Tuesday.  Bravely I bid my wife farewell and told her I’d text her and let her know when she should come by to pick me up.  I called her rather quickly as the nurse upstairs confirmed that the procedure wasn’t done at this office, but rather across the street from where I’d just been for the Xray.  Back over at the Bridgeview Endoscopy Center, they didn’t have an Android charger either.  A guy named John engaged the nurse after me and when they came from the inner sanctum calling for “John?” he jumped up first.  Fortunately they has my last name as well. 

Out in the other room I stripped down, as requested, and threw on the hospital pj’s.  One nurse who seemed kinda Irish told me what to do with my clothes and my wedding ring and then a blond who seemed kinda Italian put the IV in my arm. We talked fasting.  She thought that I fasted for a few days was noteworthy.  The anesthesiologist, who was kinda Indian, explained how it was he was going to, as Lenny Bruce described it, ‘kenerp-me.’  I got ready for the lights to go out but he said they were only going to run the kenerp fluid in, later in the other room.  I stared at the wallpaper and wondered, as one does, what it would be like not to reawaken. 

 

Infantilized, I tried to enjoy the ride down the hall into the room where they do the procedure.  Two middle aged African American women who reminded me immediately of some of the teacher’s aides I worked with at High School Redirection in Brownsville, were in this room and like the kinda Irish gal and the kinda Italian lady they both talked very loudly amongst themselves and at me.  The doc came in and they all joked a lot and he threw on the radio and suggested it would be “Play That Funky Music White Boy,” which seemed unceremonious but there was a commercial and then “The Way You Do the Things You Do” began to play and doctor who was kinda non-descript white fella, pointed out that this song being sung by the Temptations was actually written by Smokey Robinson and though later I thought of many funny things I might have said as they prepared for a virgin voyage up my ass, I just took it all in quietly and then suddenly I was gone. 

 

And when consciousness returned, I was back in the dressing room with the kinda Irish lady and though I tried to make eye contact with the kinda Italian lady with whom I’d bonded over fasting, and who I saw chatting over at the table, she didn’t pay me any mind and slowly I took stock of myself and, as instructed after the curtain closed, I began to get dressed.   “Good news.  You’re all clear.  No need to come again for ten years.”  The Doc explained as I assembled my wits and considered what life might be like at sixty-five.

 

 

 

Thursday, 4/29/21