Nurse: What is he saying? (Nurse now also laughing)
Kim: It’s an inside joke with him and his friend Melanie.
Penn: “ANESTHEEEEIIIZURRRRE!”
Kim: Honey, you’re being really loud.
Nurse: Oh, he’s not even awake yet. This is all subconscious.(4 more nurses have now shown up and are all laughing)
Penn: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Nurse: This is the best part of my job, right before they wake up.
That, according to Kim, was me in the recovery room, after my first Colonoscopy. According to her, it was the happiest she’d ever seen me, even though my eyes were closed and I wasn’t really awake. I remember none of this.
Apparently, this happens a lot in the recovery room, but the nurse said I was “particularly giddy.” Kim thinks it’s because that is my natural disposition. Looking back on it, I think it was because I had the lightness of a man who just had a tremendous weight lifted off me.
To understand that better, let’s go back a day.
Into The Unknown
There is so much talk about the infamous “Prep Day” for the colonoscopy. It mostly surrounds the unpleasant taste of the prep liquid and the resulting water slide that follows. To be honest, that didn’t bother me that much. I had enough Milwaukee’s Best in college to know that you just chug it as fast as you can and have a chaser ready. The water slide was manageable. (Yes, that is what I am calling my bathroom time.) I also have done some intermittent fasting, so the no food part was OK too.
The worst part, by a very large margin? The unexpected anxiety.
I started thinking about it months ago when I made the appointment. I had no symptoms, no reason to worry, but this voice popped up in my head: They will be seeing parts of me I’ve never seen before. There’s no way of knowing what may happen.
As the days counted down, the voice got a little louder: What if?
What if they find something?
What if they need to operate?
The morning of, all I could think of was: What if this is the last normal day of my life?
What if I don’t wake up?
The Three Outcomes
Yeah, it got pretty intense. I love my life. I want to live a lot more of it, and for some reason, I felt like this procedure was getting in the way. I know, it’s a totally irrational thought but I was so scared of this potential U-Turn, if I had the ability to manifest a power outage where they had to postpone the procedure another 3 months, I would have done it.
How messed up is that?
Luckily, the morning of the procedure, Kim and I sat down to record a podcast with a friend, Brooks Bell, who also happens to be a world-class badass and advocate for colonoscopies. She is on the other side of this: She was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at age 38. She’s fully recovered and has made it her life’s mission to get more people to get colonoscopies. She even owns a clothing company to raise colon cancer awareness, Worldclass.
Brooks said something to me that morning, and it’s the most important thing anyone could ever say to anyone like me:
If you go in, there are only three possible outcomes, and all of them are positive:
You are free and clean, no problems.
You find polyps. Polyps aren’t cancer, but all cancer comes from polyps. The doctor takes the polyps off. You don’t have cancer, and now you are farther away from cancer.
The doctor finds something. Action is taken immediately, and thank God you went in, or it would have gotten worse.
Get Yourself Checked
In the end, it took Brooks’s sage advice and Kim’s veteran poise (she has had several of these, she has ulcerative colitis and a family history) to win out over those intense thoughts. And thank God it did.
For me, it was outcome #2. My doctor found six polyps, between 4-6 mm. Not huge, but not nothing. They all came out cancer-free, though he told me one of them was classified as “pre-cancerous”. I’ll come back in 5 years for another check-in.
Imagine if my anxiety led to procrastination, and that procrastination led to the end of my life. It was a real possibility. It’s also apparently a real feeling many of you have as well. After posting our video about this, here are some comments:
Hear More About Butt Stuff
While we always try to take a light-hearted approach to everything we do, cancer is serious. By 2030, colon cancer is predicted to be the top cancer death for people younger than 50. That’s why it’s important to get your cancer screenings when they are recommended. Listen to our podcast to hear more from Stage III colon cancer survivor and entrepreneur, Brooks Bell:
