Good news, everyone: I’m not pregnant! During yesterday’s gripefest about urine sample requests, I forgot to clarify the obvious: we aren’t asked to do it for sport, it’s to establish we aren’t pregnant prior to sedation and surgery.* (Scopes are technically considered surgical procedures even though no one’s going to say “I had surgery” about a colonoscopy.) Crankenstein and I were naturally on tenterhooks while waiting for the results, which arrived within minutes but only posted to my patient portal today.
This reminded me of the darker side of people-watching at the endoscopy clinic (the lighter side being the steak and eggs crowd), and of the two strangers who haunt me. One was a woman, no older than 25, with a large baby bump. Her IBD was flaring during pregnancy, which is dangerous for mother and child alike — much more so than being scoped. She and her husband were nervous wrecks, as you’d expect. The more she cried out in pain, the younger and more helpless he looked, until he could’ve passed for 16.
I thought of them on Thursday and hoped their story had a happy ending; my sister was also pregnant then, with a kid who just started first grade. On another occasion there was a ruggedly handsome construction worker who looked, given the setting, curiously young and fit. He was in his mid-thirties, barely older than me, but you could tell something was off by the way his wife and his mother flittered over him, trying to anticipate his every need and anxiously talking too much. Once they were sent to the waiting room, he dropped some of his bravado and seemed to shrink in size and personality.
There are questions you’re asked ahead of hospital procedures to make sure everyone’s on the same page. You’re quizzed, again and again — at the registration desk, as nurses prepare you for whatever awaits, and again in the scope room before the lights are dimmed — about your name, date of birth, what you’re having done and why it was ordered. The answer I hear the most at GI clinics is “Colonoscopy, because I’m old now,” or “Colonoscopy, because it’s been five [or 10] years since the last one.”
The construction worker was directly across the aisle from me and the floor was mostly quiet. We could hear each other’s conversations and the squeaking of nurses’ shoes, the clacking of their keyboards, the rolling of their desk chairs. An anesthesiologist approached and started grilling him. He was there to learn more about a mass on his pancreas. I thought of him every time someone — Crankenstein, the research coordinator, the anesthesiologist when he asked how many times a day I take levodopa and I replied five — looked at me with pity yesterday.
“There are worse things in the world than having a j-pouch that’s old enough to run for president,” I wanted to say, since a couple of them reprised their ‘poor thing’ expressions about mine. “There are worse things than Parkinson’s or pills getting stuck.” Like a pancreatic tumor. If the construction worker’s was cancerous, he probably died a few years ago, leaving behind a wife and children. I’m still here, reading about how to make GIFs so Mary’s gayest moments on Eight is Enough can be easily shared with all 30 or so people across the globe who want to relive them.
If you’re inclined to feel bad for me, I guess that’s an acceptable reason, the sad Eight is Enough GIF-making. But medical stuff? Nah. Things have been suboptimal lately but there are always others who have it worse.
* I also forgot to mention my suspicion that Kate Bush wrote “Running Up That Hill” — more specifically, the lyrics “And if I only could/I’d make a deal with God/And I’d get Him to swap our places” — while struggling to pee in a cup on demand.