I haven't been around lately because I've been busy having...
a) crazy bad fatigue
b) a boyfriend
c) a documentary made starring my intestines
d) all of the above
If you picked D, you are strangely correct!
I have had chronic fatigue for at least a year now, and sometimes it's bad, but for a few weeks there it was
crazy bad where it was all I could do to move my limbs, and just the
thought of dressing myself or preparing a meal seemed overwhelming. Writing a blog post was out of the question. Then it went away overnight and now I'm back to regular fatigue again. My body is incomprehensible.
For the record, the boyfriend
is younger but only by four and a half years. He really took his sweet time getting born. (Thankfully it didn't take him
quite that long to realize how great we would be together.)
I got a head start on my colonoscopies at age twenty-three -- but that's another story. That time, they told me to come back in five years. Understandably, I wasn't in a big hurry to repeat that experience, so almost ten years later I finally got around to scheduling it. My boyfriend Drew was moving out of state for graduate school on the day of my colonoscopy. Besides the fact that we just started dating, talk about bad timing! I could have rescheduled, but I figured this way I would be too drugged to be sad. The problem was that I forgot about the, ahem, "prep."
There are several steps that must be taken before the procedure, the first being five days out and the last being mere hours prior. The first step is as easy as quitting iron supplements and the last is drinking the laxative. The laxative is really the worst part of the whole ordeal. It tastes like super salty Gatorade that has been swished around in someone's mouth for awhile, and you have to drink a huge jug of it until you are gagging.
Reading the instructions, I realized I had to start the laxative early on our last evening together, which is so not conductive to a long, lingering goodbye. Obviously we wanted to spend every last minute together, but at the same time I didn't want our last moments together to be... interrupted. When it was almost time, I checked the sheet again to find that I had misread it and would not need to drink the stuff until the next morning. So that was horrible because we could have actually planned a memorable evening instead of rushing home by 5:00 p.m., but it was wonderful because
the evening could have been a little too memorable.
I was glad that they improved the laxative, though; this time it tasted merely like cough syrup.
Story Time! The previous weekend our church had a barbecue in the park, for which we had reserved one of the pavilions. Drew and I showed up, got in line for food, then realized there were several generations between us and everyone else there. Then we saw our church at... the neighboring pavilion. We were accidentally in line for a high school reunion for the class of 1951! (And there were a lot of people there, considering how many in their class must have died already. I didn't even go to my ten-year reunion so I can't imagine having any desire to go to... whatever number reunion that was! Fifty-fifth? Wait, are they doing it every five years because they know if they wait another ten years half of them will be gone? Weird, I took the opposite approach to my colonoscopy frequency.) The funny part was that even though we clearly did not fit in, no one questioned us.
This was a similar situation, except
all the butt doctors (and butt nurses, butt secretaries, etc) were questioning me. I was clearly the youngest person in the waiting room. No one was even in their fifties or sixties; it was all seventies-plus here.
Did I say the laxative was the worst part? Maybe. The
creepiest part is the drugs. You get a sedative, but also you get amnesia. So you're sort of awake while it's happening, but then you just don't remember later. For some reason, this creeps me out worse than just being out completely. How do I know they're not taking advantage of me in my semi-conscious state, and then wiping out my memories?
When I was twenty-three and they found polyps, they told me to come back in five years, and if everything looked good then, I wouldn't have to come back for another ten years after that. This time they didn't even find anything, but they said to come back again in
five years. How does that make sense?!
Come back, come back, you're the freshest piece of ass we've seen in awhile! No way, perverts just want to go up my butt again.
On the other hand, a couple days before my colonoscopy, I went to the dentist and Dr. Whoa (whose name is not really Dr. Whoa but when he walked into the room, he tripped while introducing himself and now I'll never remember his real name) practically kicked me out... Bo-ring! Get out of here and don't come back until you have something for us to do. Rude!
In conclusion, I aced all my exams.
