First post on multi-disciplinary art is about the unsedated journey through my colon!
I purported to write a blog on process as an artist. Frankly, there isn’t anything more interesting to me than anything else, and there isn’t a better place to start than this week’s unsedated colonoscopy.
The body,
this thing that I once felt let me down until I accepted that the whole thing is meant to let us down. Us, as though we are actually something. It’s here to slug us around until it can’t anymore, and it’s fragile. It’s the most easily breakable thing I can think of, killed in an infinite number of scenarios in my mind on any adventurous night of dreaming. The body formed around the spine, the nervous system reaching out from our backs like the roots of the tree. The limbs carry the roots, the roots walk. We’re a walking tree. We’re also a single line from our mouth to our asshole, which is the focus of today’s topic.
I’m 36, about to turn 37, and I didn’t expect to schedule a colonoscopy before a doctor insisted I get one. But a family member has Stage 4 colorectal cancer, and they are much younger than one should get CRC, in fact it was likely growing since they were a child, which is the worst nightmare I can imagine as I recall them being a child, recall moments of laughter and celebration and of sadness with them and imagine that all the while, cancer was eating their small body; the worst nightmare I can imagine as I spend each day with my own children, 6 and 11, and play with them and mediate arguments and sometimes lose my usually unusually cool perhaps emotionless face, imagine them growing cancer in their little bodies and the most I can do (and the best I have done) is play Weird Al’s Albuquerque and laugh at his mother force-feeding him sauerkraut, yelling, “IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!” and yes, I make sauerkraut and we love the song Albuquerque and the children eat it, and whether or not cancer is growing is something I have to set aside because inevitably, according to observation, I suppose, we will all die of something. My dear children, everyone I know and love, everyone I don’t know and love, and me.
A genetic counselor recommended I get a colonoscopy right now, though, so for my own guts, I skipped the imaginal replaying of cancerous cells growing families in my underworld and scheduled the thing. I felt ready for it. This last winter, the old cast iron pipes under the kitchen cracked and a shit lake grew and I went under my own house and army crawled with a gas mask on no less than thirty times over the course of two months. We found the poop after every technician said it was fine, we pointed them towards it, in fact pointed them directly at a leak just on the other side of the furnace tubing where we repeatedly pointed and said, “Are you sure you can get to that side of the tubing to have a look?” and the technicians all said of course and would you believe it, could you believe that multiple techs, all men, I add for no reason at all, did not find the sewer lake on the other side of the ductwork that I suspected would not be crawled over?
My dear person with cancer, the doctors repeatedly turned them away saying they were too young for it to be any other than hemorrhoids, scheduled a colonoscopy months out, wrote them off as requesting too many painkillers. I mention this in case you have any rectal bleeding that you assumed was hemorrhoids: colorectal cancer is increasingly seen in teenagers, young adults, and 40-year-olds, particularly in the most “wealthy” countries. Our processed food and mountains of plastic are probably killing us but the articles are all just shrugging because if any of them definitively agreed we are being poisoned, something might have to happen and that costs a lot of pretend money that feeds the people who have mostly lost their humanity. But here’s the reality: colorectal cancer is on the rise for everyone under 50. If your ass is bleeding, if your digestion suddenly got weird, if you keep pointing to your bleeding butt and the doctors keep saying, “Huh, I don’t see anything,” throw a fit and request a colonoscopy and cite this blog, site any number of research articles online, get someone in there.
Enough about your ass, let’s talk about mine.
I learned that the folks in the USA get their butts probed while sedated, and most of the rest of the world does not. I didn’t learn this from my doctor. No, I was scheduled for a colonoscopy and was told I’d be sedated and then I assumed that’s how it must be but then, as any diligent student does, I went on PubMed and Reddit and quickly learned people get unsedated colonoscopies all the time. Just not in the United States, country of obliteration destroying the planet, destroying any chance at us having to actually feel our own bodies via pharmaceutical companies, addiction to phones, so on and so forth. If you have a favorite way to obliterate your experiences, share in the comments! Now, choosing to have 5-6 feet of your colon snaked while you sleep might not be obliteration, since, you know, The Body Keeps the Score. It’s here, whether or not you’re awake for it.
I wanted to be unsedated, though. Why? Because 1. I learned it was an option and I don’t want anesthesia in my body if I’m not being sliced open, because 2. I learned tons of people every day around the world do this unsedated 3. Because I had to watch my dear person receive news of their cancer while being shaken awake from sedation 4. Again, it is just my butt and the probe can only go so far and if I’m awake for it, the doctor probably will have to be more gentle and will have to look into my eyes after being through another portal and all of the theatrics in the world of the medical system aside, I trusted that a doctor who agreed to be in my colon with me would be someone who I could laugh with, trust, get married to and so forth.
To get the completely unmedicated colonoscopy approved, I had to talk to a nurse. I had to relay to a nurse this is what I wanted, she had to agree. She did call back and say we would do an alert sedation where I was on two different opioids while they went in my butt. I had to say, “Oh my god, I do NOT want to be high on fentanyl while someone crawls around my insides, just put it in my ass!” at which point, she laughed and said, “I got you, girl,” and she did. I’m her girl. If someone said, “We won’t do this unless you are sedated,” then I would have asked for another surgeon. I don’t want anyone in a hurry or in doubt about someone’s ability to make their own decision, again, when the rest of the world does these awake, to look in my butthole without me.
For the fasting day, which was the day before the colonoscopy, you don’t have to only make yourself sick on sugar. Tea as well as clear broth is on the fasting diet. I had matcha (which also suppresses appetite) and pho broth early in the day. The instructions said 16 ounces of liquids an hour, which is a cup every thirty minutes? Seemed like not enough so I did my usual constant sipping on something. At 4, I had to take 4 tablets of dulcolax, a laxative that made me feel incredibly nauseous, just as nauseous as the Tilt a Whirl I happened to ride the day before made me feel, so I lied on the cold bathroom floor like a small child or my drunken young adult self (or me, the day before) and waited for something to pass, either a full fountain of all my liquids from my throat, or the nausea. Nausea passed after one hour and forty five minutes.
During this time, I pulled some tarot cards: the 5 of cups, The Devil, The Magician, and The Hermit. I closed my eyes and thought on these cards. Every time I am in an extreme state of physical discomfort, I turn my mind towards philosophy and storytelling. In this case, the story I told went something like: All five cups of my liquids are going to come out of me as I am here, alone in the cave of the bathroom and I will come out of that inspired, do the squat of the devil, birth my own intestines, and then cast a spell around my mortality and the spell will fail and I will die, or the spell will work and I will die, and either way, I will have crossed a bridge, a forever Girl Scout I am.
Once I started drinking the second laxative, GoLytely, I was pleased to find the electrolytes resurrected me. I did not add any flavoring to it. It was quite salty. I said, “Ah, it’s time to drink my bucket of tears!” And so I did, every ten minutes I drank 6 ounces of tears in a small glass and after two hours, the tears began to rain out, a pee storm of my bum. I felt pretty good. I’d drink the tears, and then I’d drink a single drink of ginger beer, and then I’d lie on the ground with a 10-minute timer on. I told my children I couldn’t carry them to bed that night, usually I give them a ride on the Pee Train, where I carry them to the toilet to pee and then to go brush their teeth. Not this night. In fact, I told them I was the Poop Troll who lives under the bridge of the bathroom.
The hospital I had to get to by 7 in the morning was 24 miles away, nearly 45 minutes of driving. The medical sites on the internet offered no help in telling me when the laxatives would stop working, but people on Reddit did: I might poop my pants for three days.
Alright, we’ve made it to the hospital. I did not poop my pants, I waited around for ages and I wrote:
““At the hospital, in waiting area, still thinking of a pizza. The hospital seems to be running without any concern that the people in it are, most of them, alive. Hungry, only water coming from my asshole, hunger from every hole. A man is breathing a snarled monster breath, a dog with a smashed face but he seems quite capable of controlling it. A certain type of man. He yawned, an even louder noise. Are men so loud because they are so ignored in their pain? Oh no, he yawned again. Louder. I’m afraid I’ll never get my asshole probed. Measles warnings on plastic, stuck to the walls, all the walls. What luck to be born to the garbage species, the plastic animal.” ”
I get called back and then I get asked if I can pee in a cup and I say no, my bladder has nothing in it, so I cannot take their pregnancy test so I sign a paper saying I am not pregnant. I repeat that I’d like no medication, they say they will give me an IV because I am so dehydrated that my veins have completely disappeared and I look down at my hand and it looks like the hand of a child. I haven’t seen my hand so smooth, so free of protruding blue veins, since my younger years of young.
I hear nurses laughing loudly, much more loudly than they should, at a man who is saying nothing particularly funny but he is putting on the performance of funny and so women laugh. Again, irritation at the loudness of men, sad that our society doesn’t let men feel their feelings and so they practice getting louder and louder in every possible way and we just lie to them, they aren’t funny and we laugh anyway and how that’s the cruelest thing of all happening in this hospital.
The thing they were all hysterical and loud over was him saying, “Are you here to watch the show?”
He arrives twenty minutes after me but he gets taken back immediately while nurses go back and forth communicating I’m not getting any medication but I have an IV and I can request medication at any point should I choose to put the opioids in me and go for a wild ride.
I meet the surgeon, who apologizes for my dear one with cancer but says she is glad I have come to get my colonoscopy and she says she is going to go slowly and will let me know when to expect pain and I’m happy she is looking at me in my eyes before looking at my insides.
We go to the room, which is a white room and I observe how every bit of that room could be taken apart easily, how the trash cans could go and the little rolling carts could leave and the screen attached to the table could depart, how in less than five minutes, the whole room could be completely empty and white, windowless, florescent. But for now, I am in it, and there are three other women in this room and everyone is excited, as they haven’t seen one of these unmedicated and are happy to accommodate me and I turn over on my side and there is a big screen in front of me and the doctor asks if I would like any music to relax me and I say no, there is enough natural music in the room already then she says she will put lube on my anus and there it is and suddenly the scope is in and I am taking a ride on the magic school bus!
I watch the entire journey on the huge screen in front of me. The surgeon uses water to clean mucus that remains, she traverses the length of my whole colon and for the first half of the trip, I laugh because it tickles and the women ask what it feels like and I say it reminds me of being pregnant and having my fetus wiggle around in me before they become big and fat and cramp my abdomen. As they go further along, I share that now, it feels like I have a huge fetus who is kicking me. At some point, it just starts feeling like moderate period cramps. Eventually, as they reach the end, it becomes harder to to remember to breathe evenly. I notice my feet are clenching and I let them go and I think, “This is about as painful as a miscarriage.” I had twelve of them. I sit with all twelve of my miscarriages at once. Then, someone celebrates: “We’ve reached the cecum! You are amazing!”
At this point, they all start talking about their surprise at my endurance. I share that I’ve been able to talk through all of it except for about two minutes when I was thinking on the miscarriages and remembering to breathe and doing some low humming. The doctor says she now is going to turn the scope around and do the exam. She fills my colon with air and she tells me to please fart! To please not try to hold anything in! I assure her I surrendered all control of my anus when she first started the journey.
We talk about my siblings. We talk about growing up in Albuquerque. We talk about the incredible tool that is the scope! It sprays water, it sprays air, it has a metal lasso to remove polyps, it can send a polyp through the length of it to come out the other side to send away for a biopsy. There is one polyp. I can hardly see it, it is light pink and blends in with the wall of my colon and I watch her lasso it, cut it off, wish it well, wish me well.
I am surprised I only had a single polyp, considering the state of the food I ate as a poor kid who lived off of shelf stable food donations and school lunch. Considering that I couldn’t eat most foods for eight years after I became allergic to everything, including water, in my early twenties.
Thirty minutes pass. Once, I consider that maybe I should do this sedated the next time around because of the severe cramping. Then, the scope moves and the cramps go away and my body fully births the snake and the surgeon goes in quickly one last time to see if I have any internal hemorrhoids (I don’t! Only the one external one that arrived two months after having my first baby and never quite receded).
The nurse says she feels inspired and wants the surgeon to do her unsedated colonoscopy for her. She says she feels like the is asking the surgeon to prom.
I say, “It makes sense that this is described as painful, but it mostly just feels like pain I’ve felt since I got my first period. I’m pretty sure most women know this pain, even the worst parts of it, and we deal with it for much longer than 30 minutes.”
Men, if you want to know what it feels like to have period cramps, or to have a baby kick your guts, get an unmedicated colonoscopy! I’m using these words, these specific words, men, and women, strongly here, referring to the sort of calcification of experience that happens being raised as a man or a women. What was going on? Woman, an identifier I use, despite not it being an identity I hold. Men, I mean as people who do not live in physical pain for a significant part of their lives, and who are pretty closed off in their hearts not because they want to be but because they were raised to be.
I didn’t expect this experience to have me thinking on my body, on growing up with a uterus, so much. I thought it was about my butt, forgetting that the real star of childbirth is your butt.
This experience did not at all compare to childbirth. You cannot compare a skinny little tube going through a bigger tube to a baby skull coming through your separating pelvis. These experiences do not compare, but there were certainly moments of utter discomfort. I’ve seen a study on “Lamaze colonoscopy” as in using the Lamaze breathing technique to get through a colonoscopy. I had no interest in Lamaze during childbirth, but if you like it and you’d like an unmedicated colonoscopy, do it and let me know how it goes. My breathing was slow breaths, a few seconds in, a few seconds out, and low humming on the parts that were extremely pressurized and cramped.
The surgeon said, “You did wonderfully. Just shake around a bit, all that extra air and water needs to come out and you will feel very good.” I said, “You did wonderfully, too. Thank you.”
In the future, if I sense that there is something wrong with my gut, deeply wrong, if I have something incredibly uncomfortable happening and I don’t want to feel it being probed, don’t want to see it, I’ll opt for sedation. Maybe. I might also want to see what’s going on in there and opt for medication if it becomes too painful. It’s hard to say what would happen if I have a sense something is very wrong. But as of now, I do plan to do this unsedated again in five years, which is when I have to return because of the polyp.
The walk through my guts felt humbling. Seeing your aliveness from the inside, seeing parts of you, more parts of you, that you could never design yourself, that just, miraculously, are formed from seeds, places a hand on the mystery of this whole thing.
Mystery is where art comes from.
And that’s how my colonoscopy is part of my art practice.
Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!
“Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy! ”
The end.