In which I go under the knife

Or something like that, anyway. But don't call it "spit roasted."

One of my law professor friends just sent me pictures from his Spring-Recess trip to a fancy resort.  (“Spring Recess” is what universities have instead of Easter Holiday.  Spring Recess has nothing to do with Easter, it just always takes place at Easter weekend.)

So what did I do?  I got scoped – colonoscopy and, from the other end, an endoscopy.  (The gastroenterological community is not amused when you refer to that procedure as a “spitroast.”  I stand corrected.)

Everything turned out fine, as it has every time.  Helen, for some reason, decided that I needed to get mine done a year early – a wifely intuition that I think was actually just triggered by a stomach bug that I had.  But wifely intuitions are often correct, so I went ahead.  (And I knew I’d reached a certain age when I was no longer smugly assured that the results of any medical test would be good news.  So far they still are, but I’m no longer smugly assured about it . . . )

As always, these things are kind of a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, if they don’t find anything wrong, then in some sense you’ve gone through it for nothing.  (Though they did remove a few small colon polyps, about which more later).  But on the other hand, you don’t want them to find anything wrong, because, well, then you have something wrong.

Unlike Helen, I don’t have a family history of stomach or intestinal cancers.  But I’m kind of sensitive to this stuff because my high school friend Joel Andrews died of colon cancer, and at a rather young age.  He lost his health insurance due to ObamaCare, skipped having a colonoscopy at 50 because it was prohibitively expensive out of pocket and he had a family to support, and a few years later started feeling run down, then bloated, then got diagnosed with stage IV metastatic colon cancer and died a few weeks later.  Something that could have, literally, been nipped in the bud if the cancerous polyp had been removed while it was pre-cancerous, or even still benign.

And so I was happy they removed my polyps, small and well-behaved as they appeared to be.  The GI doc told me that the scopes now have “AI” built in that works like face detection on a digital camera, putting a yellow square around things that it thinks might be polyps to make them impossible to miss.  (It’s really more like an expert system, I think.)  He said he catches a lot more, and smaller, ones than he did before.  That’s good.  Not all polyps become cancerous, but most cancers start out as polyps.  Get rid of them and you get rid of the possibility of cancer.  There’s now a blood test for cancer that’s good-ish, but it doesn’t stop problems before they start.  Likewise there’s a semi-useful poop-DNA test for cancer, but it tells you if you have cancer, it doesn’t do anything to prevent it. 

Some people are squeamish about this procedure because it involves something being stuck up your butt, but I promise, you won’t be the least bit aware of it.  (The first time I had the scope they used “twilight” anesthesia, and I was vaguely aware of something going on, though it wasn’t bad.  Now they use propofol and it’s lights out.)  So if there’s anyone out there on the fence, don’t worry.

The clean-out-your-insides prep is the worst part of it, but they’ve figured out how to shorten that, and instead of a gallon of icky tasting stuff  over a whole day, I only had to drink a couple of glasses starting at 5 pm.  They were highly effective, though, and I just kept a good book handy.

(I did wear a special t-shirt for the event.  Here you see me below, after returning home only slightly the worse for wear.)  Worst part was having to get up at an absurdly early hour.  The doc and staff were amused.

I do the endoscopy occasionally because I take Nexium for a hyperacid stomach and that acid reduction means there’s a risk that if I had stomach cancer it wouldn’t hurt enough to attract attention early.  That test is really nothing.  No prep required.  Everything was fine on that end, too.

Anyway, it wasn’t a weekend at a fancy resort, but it’s done now and won’t have to be repeated for five years.  If you’re a candidate, but being held back by squeamishness, well, don’t let that hold you back.  If your problems are financial, they often offer a much lower rate to people without insurance.  I wish Joel had looked into that, but I think he figured his risk was low anyway.  I wish he had been right.

And in closing I’ll note that stomach and colon cancer rates are way up for younger people nowadays, for reasons that are still unclear.  (I have some thoughts on why that might be, but they’re rankest speculation at this point.)  But that does mean that people in their 40s, or even their late 30s, might want to think about getting scoped.  You don’t want to wind up dead, or with a colostomy, just because you didn’t get a polyp snipped off a few years earlier.

At least, I don’t.  You can decide for yourselves.