Colonoscopy: Part II

I’d call myself—among other things—a nervous urinator.  By this, I mean that whenever I’m a bit anxious, whether it be leading up to giving a talk before a large audience, getting ready to run a half marathon, or sometimes even before going to bed (what?), I feel as if I have to go to the bathroom even though I know I really don’t.  All of these feelings were amplified the Friday at 7:30 in the morning when I was walking past the men’s restroom in the empty second-floor hallway of G.I. Health Specialists of Trumbull, Connecticut.  My nerves were not at all related to what might go wrong.  I believe, to some degree, that a person gets to choose what they think about, and so I tried to interrupt myself every time I caught myself beginning to imagine a perforation or something worse.  Additionally, I think writing and thinking about events can sometimes draw those events into reality.  According to that philosophy, if I’d have thought too much about all that could go wrong, then I might have increased the chances that something would.  Call it superstitious, but that’s my theory, and I believe it works the other way round too, for good stuff.

Following my posting of “Colonoscopy Part I,” I received quite a few messages from people who have a colonoscopy scheduled and what they want to know is what to expect.  I’m thinking—with a nod to the pregnancy book by Murkoff and Mazel—that this piece needs to be more of a What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Colonoscopy. It won’t be the full out book-length version but I’ll go into a little more detail than I first planned.  If you’ve got your upcoming procedure and have a non-medical question, look me up on Facebook, and I’ll see if I can help.

First off, the day before the procedure, there is no eating.  I drank water, a couple cups of coffee, and many many bottles of Gatorade.  I was told that I could “eat” Jello and broth but what’s the use of that?  There’s like 15 calories tops in a serving of Jello.  The day before a colonoscopy is at best a day for a sugar high.  The very tricky part for me was that I was supposed to take the tornado-strong laxative at 3:00, the exact time that I finish teaching my last class which is followed by a commute home which takes over an hour.  The directions called for me to take two pills, wait an hour, and then start drinking this big tub of solution that came in a sort of colonoscopy care package.  The mixture, as my doctor explained, tastes nasty but the good part about it is that you forget that you are very hungry.

My original—VERY BAD—plan was to mix the tub of solution to drink the night before, leave it in the fridge, and then take my pills when I got in the car and be ready to sit next to the toilet by the time I got home.  I had been thinking that the time-delayed laxative would work on a schedule the way I do:  right down to the very correct and planned second.  Fortunately, my wife Megan (who knows even more than my old cross-country buddies that my intestines work on hyper-speed) talked me out of this idea.

My revised plan was to let my students out of class a little early, then take my pills halfway home, giving myself thirty minutes or so to make it into the initial vicinity of my toilet.  Even with this revised plan, I was unable to pull the trigger of popping the pills into my mouth.  In my mind’s eye, I could see traffic slowing to a stop just as the pills went down my throat.  Would I just go in my pants?  Pull over to the side of the road and look for cover?  I didn’t take the pills until I was rounding the final corner of my last curve on Interstate 95.

Fifty three minutes later—I timed it—I made my first trip to the bathroom.  That was followed by my first chugging of the cleansing.  I chose the cherry flavor and am not sure it was of any taste benefit.  It was like spraying potpourri into a stanky bathroom.  The stanky smell stays but now it hints of rotting wildflower.  I went to the bathroom ten or so times in the next three hours and drank from the tub every fifteen minutes.  I was chugging the stuff well over an hour.  I went to bed early and then rose to go to the bathroom around midnight.  Then I went again around 6:00 a.m. and right before I left for my 7:30 a.m. appointment.  Only the first and maybe the second was really anything like having a bowel movement.  Actually my hiney had turned into a kind of nuclear power water gun which I fired into our toilet.

In that empty hallway of my G.I. specialist, I stood there looking at the “Men” sign on the restroom door, then I started to go in.  Next, I told myself, you don’t have to go.  You’ve had practically fifteen bowel movements in the past twelve hours. I walked ten or so steps down the hall to where the office was.  I didn’t even have to go to the hospital for this, just a special room with what I’d imagined to look like a dentist’s chair or one of those ones where a women’s legs are put in stirrups so she can be examined.  (I think I remember something like this from when my wife was pregnant.) Of course in my imaginings I’d have to be placed face-down in this special colonoscopy chair.

I stopped walking to office, turned around, and came back to the restroom door.  I almost went in.  I’d heard that I’d be given something to help me relax and that short term memory loss was a likely side effect of this drug.  I thought of women being given this drug for childbirth.  I’d read or imagined that bit of info too.  As you can see, I read just enough about certain topics to be dangerous.  I thought of women howling in pain but forgetting later about what they’d felt.  I wondered about feeling intense suffering in the moment but not remembering that you’d suffered.  Would this be a benefit?  Would one want to remember their suffering or not?  It all made me feel as if I was in the Matrix or that other movie, Vanilla Sky. Did I want a dreamy colonoscopy or did I want reality?

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to connect the pain of colonoscopy (there didn’t turn out to be any) with childbirth.  I’m just telling you what I was thinking about before I went in.  I was also thinking about my bowels and that if I was given something to relax then did that mean that my bowels would relax too?  I remembered that my doc had said he’d done thousands of these.  I figured whatever I might do had surely already happened over his experience.  I might or might not remember.  I decided to go on into the office and forget one last attempt on the can.

For some reason, I’d imagined that it would be my doctor and an assistant that would be in the office waiting for me, but there was a lot more action than that.  There were at least five or six people behind the desk, all of them women and obviously used to being up early on Friday morning.  I was asked who was picking me up and for that person’s phone number.  I told the woman behind the counter that my wife was picking me up, and then without yet realizing it, I gave the nurse my phone number.  She asked me if I had a living will or some other directive. I told her no and shrugged those questions off the way I’d shrugged off signing waivers before running marathons:  I tried not to think of it. I succeeded almost immediately.

There was one other man already there, a lot older than me.  I’m thirty-nine by the way.  Doc says if I was a few years younger then he wouldn’t have even bothered with the procedure; a few years older and he’d have wanted to do it for sure.  I was a tweener, I guess, when it comes to colonoscopies.  A woman about my age came in with her friend after that.  She got into a long thing with the nurse about her husband living all the way across the country in the state of Washington so he could work.  Talk about a long commute.

On the flat screen in the waiting room there were videos of colonoscopies being shown.  Mostly it was just fleshy pink insides with a light worming its way into a dark tunnel in the distance. I thought of this as a sort of “best of” compilation of the doctors previous colonoscopies.  I hoped that once inside I’d get to see my own procedure, perhaps even be able to make some suggestions towards the final production.

Sorry that this has gone on so long. I really do hope that Part III will be the last of this.

Colonoscopy: Part I

Before I tell you about a recent colonoscopy procedure I had done, I want to tell you about an idea I have for a story that I’d call “Modern Medicine.”  There’s this guy (hmmm, this is starting to feel very autobiographical) who had blood in his stool a couple times.  He’s pretty sure that he can control this little unpleasant feature of his bathroom  life by altering his diet, but to be safe he visits his physician.  After a gushy lubricated rectal exam, the physician says that the character’s self diagnosis is likely accurate, but that he—let’s call this guy “Larry”—should have some blood work done and also visit a gastrointestinal (G.I.) physician.

For some reason (and here’s where the fiction begins) Larry thinks his insurance will cover the procedure but it doesn’t.  Or he’s between insurances (not a great explanation because if I were in this position I would not be going to the doctor for a “maybe”) and ultimately he receives a $400 dollar bill for the blood work, let’s say another $100 for the initial exam, another $200 for the specialist, and then conservatively, $2,000 for the colonoscopy.  Possibly the story ends with Larry happy to receive a clean bill of health but somewhat put out that he is a couple thousand dollars poorer.  There are of course alternative outcomes:  perhaps Larry is one of the approximately 3% of patients who suffers heavy bleeding or within the smaller percentage of people who suffer a perforation and require immediate major surgery.  This would illustrate my thinking that sometimes going to the doctor can send a perfectly healthy person spiraling down a steep hill where their snowball of wellness boulders into a mass of trouble.  Although according to various internet sources there seem to be 1 in 3,000 or 1 in 30,000 people who die from a colonoscopy, this wouldn’t have probably served my story very well.  An ending of death—plausible if not probable—would be seen by most as overly dramatic.  Up next—possibly as a warning to keep you away from this blog—will be the story of my actual procedure.

Real Life in Fiction

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.
–Stephen King, from On Writing

     In my short story “Eye Contact” a woman texts her husband a kiss “mphwaa,” (or something like that—I need Megan here to remind me of how to spell it) and then goes into a hotel and commits adultery.  This this string of letters meant to be a textual kiss is something that my real-life wife actually sends me.  This character in my story has my wife’s sister’s red hair, and probably her taste in shoes and handbags.  The character is also a pharmaceutical rep, a job that wife used to do, and a job that my buddy’s wife does now.  It’s a profession which I know just enough about that I might be able to lay down the relevant details neccessary to convince a reader to fall into what John Gardner called, “the fictional dream.” 

     My wife used to be a little obsessed—I think she’d admit—about who was who in my stories and what parts of the stories had actually happened to me.  I tried to explain this to her, but I think that it took her discovering the little details of our life in my stories for her to understand how it all worked, at least how it works for me. 

     If my stories were milkshakes, then here are some of the ingredients:  actual details of people I know and places I have been, situations I have personally experienced, heard about, or seen on the news, and everything I can dream up.  All of that gets tossed into a writing blender and eventually out comes a story, part real life, part imagination.  

     Among readers, I’m recognizing two poles: one pole is where strangers reside.  These are people who don’t know me and who have never been to Winamac, Indiana where I grew up, Bourbonnais where I went to college, or any place else I have lived.  These people read stories with no suspicions about what character might be who, as if each character has a real-life secret identity.  Somewhere between the poles are the people who know the writer just well enough to think they know who is who.  I think these people are the most dangerous when it comes to logical leaps off the wrong end of the boat dock.  They might see the coach in my novel Love on the Big Screen and think that my fictional man is the actual coach I had when I played basketball (mostly watched from the bench) at Olivet Nazarene University.  The truth is, I’ve known a lot of coaches (having been one for eight years) plus there are all those coaches I’ve watched from afar: Bob Knight, Bob Huggins, Rick Majerus, Rick Pitino, etc. and so when I write a coach, I’m thinking about what will serve the story that is unfolding before me.

     Opposite the pole where total strangers gather round, is the actual person who is rumored to be a character.  I have a friend with the last name Zaucha, a name I used in my novel for it’s capability of transforming into the nickname “Zuke.”  I wrote that friend and asked him if he was cool with me using his name.  If this friend thought the character was him, then he’d rightfully be able to say, “Bill has told a lot of lies about me.”  And if my book was nonfiction, he’d be right.  I used Zuke’s name for a reason I just shared.  The rest isn’t him and someone who says I’ve said X or Y about him would be wrong.

     What’s set me to thinking about this?  I think it’s been that I’ve got a few author’s visits planned, and some emails have come in about some of my stories. I can see that people are going to leap to conclusions about who is who in my books.  I’ve heard writers say they aren’t welcome in their hometowns anymore and maybe this is where I’m headed.  I don’t think it should be a surprise that my stories are often happening in the Midwest, that many of the details I can lay down are ones I’ve either witnessed, heard about or actually experienced—maybe for example powering that little boat I used to cruise the Tippecanoe River on—and so I’m hoping not to face too many accusations that a story like “Eye Contact” suggests that my wife is dying her hair red and sneaking into hotels.

Fear and Writing

A friend of mine wrote to me scared about an opportunity he has in that his girlfriend is going away for 21 days and he has practically the whole time to himself to write.  He’s wanted to write more but he suspects that he might instead sit around in his underwear, let the dishes pile up, and watch a lot of stupid television shows.  (if you laughed, his words)  There’s a lot in what he says that resonates a ping for me.
Let me start with fear.  I am more terrified today when I am about to write something new than I was when I got started trying to write everyday.  I think I know enough to know how badly I could screw everything up.  I’ve got Chekhov, Dubus, Ford, Boyle, and Chabon in my head and every sentence that I write is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich next to a Giada (see the Food Network) creation.   When I’m revising, no problem.  I’ve got something to work with and I can read it over and over, dink around with the sentence, chop paragraphs and put them back.  I can layer in images related to character or setting and cut what doesn’t add up to much.
As for my fear of the new sentence, I worked up a lot of what I’d call “warm ups.”  I read a poem or two from Poetry Magazine.  Since I’m not so smart there are always a few words I don’t know.   I look those up, log the definitions, and then I type in the context of the poem.  I try to look over one of those pages a day.  I don’t really learn the words as they pop up and surprise me once in awhile.  It was like that in basketball.  People who saw me play will laugh that I use this analogy.  I don’t know that I had moves in as much as I just tried to run past people and shoot.  But I think words and sentences pop out like dribbling moves on a baskteball court.  You drill and drill, you immerse yourself in the langauge, and then in the games (when you write for real) every once in awhile you surprise yourself with something new.
I’ve lost my way a bit from where I started here, but I keep telling myself that’s what I like about a blog.  I can be a little off my game, not pay total attention to my focus, but still find my way into something new to think about, find my way into 1 little bit about something I care about.  If you write, I wonder how you get going, I wonder if you’ve got half the hang ups as me that you must cling to in order to get started.

An Argument For Church From Someone Who Doesn’t Go

My father-in-law Jim recently passed away from cancer.  Several weeks before his death, my wife received a call that her dad had checked into hospice.  We began packing immediately and drove 800 miles through the night to North Carolina so that we could be sure to see him as soon as possible.  In addition to our emotional worries regarding Jim’s health, there were a lot of practical matters to consider:  Where would we stay?  I had to get back to work.  Would I rent a car or would we rent Megan one?  For how long?  At what financial cost?  Who would help Megan with our girls?

All we focused on was getting to the hospice to see Jim, and before we even had a chance to start doing the math and thinking about money, Jim’s wife called with the news that her Sunday school class had met.  Someone had an extra house outside of town that Megan and our girls could stay in indefinitely free of charge.  We arrived at the hospice, spent the day there, and then another member of this Sunday school class met us so that we could follow her out to the home we were being lent.  She did this after a full day’s work and the drive was at least thirty minutes out of her way, over an hour by the time she would get to her own house.  When we arrived at the home, the owner was already there inside cleaning it and changing the sheets.  Next, the two women took a grocery list Megan had been putting together and got ready to head to the store.  On their way out, they asked if we had any need of an extra car.  They paid for the groceries.  Everything that had just begun to hang over us had suddenly been taken care of by these  two women and the members of their Sunday school class.  My family, especially Megan, was free to concentrate on what was important, to spend time with Jim.  After I departed, this Sunday school group was in constant touch, offering to help, watching my girls, and just letting everyone know that they were around to love and help.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to church, and by that I don’t mean that my family doesn’t pray together, that we don’t talk about Jesus, or that I don’t read the Bible, but we haven’t been attending church as a family.  What transpired in the day or so that we all rushed off to North Carolina caused me to begin to think just how much we were up on our own up in New England.  We do have a growing group of friends, and I realize that it’s not just church folks who can rally around and help out those in need, but the kind people that were friends of Jim’s, those who came together as a part of Sunday school class, they all created for me one of the more convincing arguments I’ve experienced for church attendance.  I thank them for their example of Biblical love.   It’s an example I’ll be sure to try and put into practice myself.