The Fanny Diaries

The following account of my colonoscopy is intended for both mature and immature audiences. In documenting this experience, I'll try not to get too brown. Butt I'd also like to encourage you, my friends, many of whom are 50ish, to consider getting screened, because I love you and so do a handful of other people.

My friend calls me a verbal flasher. So be it. At least I'm not jotting this down while sitting in my car next to a playground.

Monday, 7:21 AM—Hopped up on two hollow-gutted coffees, I board Metro, T minus twenty-four hours, nine minutes until the glovin' starts and the lights go up.

I nestle into my favorite seat, the one in the back corner with a little extra elbow room for either writing or etching a sick tag on the window. I pull out my colonoscopy prep sheet. "No solid foods all day, only broth, coffee, soda or Popsicles. Beginning at 5:30, drink eight ounces of Golytely every ten minutes."

Golytely? Awesome name. I've heard the company has a friendly but competitive relationship with the three other giants in the power laxative market: I Shit You Lot, Fecease, and Jell-O Instant Pudding.

Monday, 7:54 AM,—When the pharmacist slides the jug onto the counter, I almost sh.. (too easy). Seriously, this is a gallon jug with the "fill line" almost to the cap. After water and a refreshing lemon flavor packet, it makes a gallon of Poolytely.

Wonder if Bartell's sells beer bong materials. Probably not. 

Monday, 5:26 PM—After fantasizing about New York style pizza all day, I bid goodnight to the family and hop in the minivan for the twenty-minute ride to Motel 6.

Our house has one bathroom. Staying there tonight wouldn't go well for anyone.

I arrive to see families playing in the inner courtyard swimming pool. Not quite the clientele I was expecting being so close to the airport, but hey, that and my ten-percent AARP discount have me feeling weak with excitement.

Monday, 5:53 PM—I enter Room 238 overlooking the pool, and slide the curtains closed. I feel like I'm hiding out after robbing a Fotomat. Might as well get comfortable. I change clothes and throw off the DNA-encrusted bedspread.

Monday, 6:01 PM—I decant the first cup of Lemon Crush. Barely makes a dent in the top of the jug. Bottoms up. "Argh," says Mr. Uvula the dangling pirate. Tastes like chilled poodle saliva. 

Only fifteen more cups to go. I set my phone alarm for ten minutes and turn on the TV. It's Wolf Blitzer with an image of Robin Williams in the corner of the screen—Robin Williams, 1951-2014.

What? No. The guy was a genius. The World According to Garp, The Fisher King, Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting, his stream-of-consciousness stand-up routines, and now he's gone. Sometimes it seemed like he couldn't get it all out fast enough. Only 63. What a loss.

Monday, 7:15 PM—Seven doses in. I'm feeling the first gurgles of a new lifestyle, so I'll sign off for a bit.

Monday, 10:47 PM—Feeling stable. Goodnight.

Tuesday, 5:15 AM—Ever the Pavlovian, upon hearing the familiar folksy refrain of my phone alarm, my brain reacts. Shit. Time to drink more of the shit.

Seeing the empty jug on the counter snaps me to reality. I feel sleepily satisfied as I stuff the plastic container into the garbage, take a shower and throw my stuff together. Farewell Motel 6. May our most intimate secrets pass silently into Puget Sound.

Tuesday, 6:01 AM—My wife is up when I arrive home. During the school year, she puts in about eighty hours a week, so she tends to enjoy sleeping in during the summer. Little is said as we climb into the Hyundai under dark dawn skies.

Tuesday, 6:44 AM—I check in at the endoscopy clinic and get a wrist band. Two other dudes come in right after me, also accompanied by female partners. Occasionally we glance at each other, sharing the bond of our impending initiation into the Brotherhood of the Bottom.

Tuesday, 6:57 AM—The nurse greets my wife and me. She's very friendly and pretty. Glad she can see me at my best. I'm led through a door and into a small bay. "Go ahead and have a seat on the bed," she says. "It's going to be your home for the whole procedure; we'll just wheel you around."

"Am I getting a general anesthetic?" I ask.

"It's not general, it's called 'conscious sedation,' a combination of drugs that help you relax and block pain. You may be awake but you won't remember anything. A lot of people just go to sleep."

She starts an I.V. and asks me a list of questions. "Okay, that's it for me. The doctor should be in shortly. Nice to meet you and I'll see you afterwards."

Tuesday, 7:10 AM—The doctor enters through the curtain, introduces himself and explains the procedure: "We wind the scope through the colon and look around. Sometimes we'll see a polyp, which is a lump in the lining caused by abnormal cell growth. If that's the case we insert instruments to clip it off and suture it."

"Are polyps common?' I say.

"They occur in about twenty-five percent of people over fifty. Okay, ready to go?"

"Sure." I watch him deftly perform multiple tasks while chatting with me. Interesting how doctors and nurses are so good at doing that. "How many of these do you do in a day?" I ask him.

"Today, fourteen."

Tuesday, 7:17 AM—The nurse rolls me into the brightly lit colonoscopy room. She asks me to lie sideways, facing the monitors and TVscreen. I always wondered how my grizzled mug would come across in HD, but today the paparazzi aren't interested in my face.

"Okay," says the doctor, "we're starting the anesthetic."

I feel my heart race and watch the digits rise on the monitor: 76, 82, 84. I still don't feel anythi...."

Tuesday, 8:09 AM—I'm sitting in a chair. My clothes are back on and my wife and doctor are standing next to me.

"We found a couple of small polyps," he says, "one was three millimeters and the other was seven millimeters. We cut them out and we'll let you know as soon as we get the results from pathology." He hands me a packet of literature.

I lose track of reality again and didn't permanently revive until I found myself riding over the West Seattle Bridge.

"Are you hungry?" asks my wife.

Hunger doesn't describe the feeling, dear bride. I could eat Little Caesar himself. "Yeah."

"Want to have breakfast at Easy Street?"

I've just gone thirty-six hours without lard. I want breakfast, lunch and dinner at Easy Street. "Yeah."

Tuesday, 9:22 AM—After washing down a club sandwich and fries with some of the best coffee I've ever tasted, we return home. I fall on the couch, turn on Dexter and sleep deeply through two episodes.

Tuesday, 11:11 AM—Feeling great.

Wednesday, 1:47 PM—Back at work. I open an email from the clinic which tell me my biopsy results are in. For the past day I've tried not to obsess over it, but Mr. OCD despises uncertainty even more than he hates Howard Schultz. I can't imagine the anxiety cancer patients must feel. Here I am, ruminating over a couple of little colon lumps for twenty-four hours, and these poor people must dance to this number over and over again.

Wednesday, 2:19 PM—I call the clinic and the nurse reads me the doctor's letter:

"Dear Mr. Haywood,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. While the polyps we removed were not found to be cancerous, we would consider them pre-cancerous and thus rightly removed.

"We would like to see you for another screening in five years. Take care."

Relief.

Please do this. It's really not a big deal in the end...so to speak. Do it for yourself and do it for everyone who cares about you.

Get your ass in there.

Beer, Biscuits and Bastards.

Ah, Portland—a town of big beards and bike riders, of blazers and Blazers.

Portland, Oregon—best frenemies forever with her bitchy but fun cousin, Seattle, two hours to the north.

And this past weekend, it's where my bride chose to celebrate a substantial milestone of which one of the following is true:

1. It's the anniversary of the first time we talked about getting a cat.
2. She turned fifty.
3. It was the day in 1988 we unknowingly received identical perms, thus at last realizing our shared destiny.

Of course the answer is number two. Number one didn't happen until March 11 and number three was a body wave, not a perm. 

So yeah, to celebrate my wife's 600-month birthday, she found a place on the southwest hill of Portland. Getting to the bottom floor of the three-story house nestled into the mossy hillside was like the beginning of Get Smart, requiring a key code to open a garage door, followed by an elevator ride to the rental unit. 

To repeat, these people put an elevator in their freaking house—just for the guests. I expected to see Mitt Romney out trimming the hedge in his mom jeans and red bandana.

Hanging from the high ceilings were reclaimed lights; the interior walls were huge windows of leaded glass. Paintings, sculptures and art supplies filled the Livingstone area. Very cool.

March is"Dining Month" in downtown Portland, where tons of restaurants offer three-course meals for $29. Although neither of us owns a smart phone and our Australian-voiced GPS "Stanley" is permanently down under, we nevertheless found a restaurant. 

Channeling the poorly bathed spirits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, we utilized crude but effective navigational methods—iPad screen captures, yellow pages*—I even briefly wrote some stuff down with a pen.

*For those under twenty, the yellow pages is a large book** with addresses and phone numbers on yellow pages.

**For those under twenty, a book is a stack of printed pages attached together and protected by a sturdy cover.

Still a couple of hours early for our dinner reservation, we decided to walk the two-mile distance to the restaurant. The weather was moist and misty, my jacket slowly trapping enough heat to steam a paper pouch of hum bows. I fantasized of peeling off my coat and wearing only the hood, the rest of the jacket swinging like Batman's cape during recess. By the time we hit the city, I looked like Gosling at the end of The Notebook, but without his face, hair, body or carpentry skills.

After slogging through puddles for half an hour. the legs of my outdated boot cut jeans had stubbornly pasted themselves to my heels. We ducked into the Westin Hotel lounge, a pleasing lobby bar with comfortable chairs and disturbing paintings of sad people with babies. 

The area teemed with well dressed young men—dudes for days—yet my bride courageously clung to the moisture-stretched arm of my cable knit sweater. I mumbled a silent prayer of gratitude for her as she gingerly knitted back into place my renegade eyebrow fibers. Bless her heart.

Two pints and some good conversation later, I excused myself to use the men's room, one floor up. Exiting on the second floor, I noticed yet another well-dressed young man sitting in one of those chairs by the elevator that no one ever sits in. 

"The restroom is over there," he said. He mumbled something else, but when a 51-year-old guy is hellbent on using the commode, idle banter is discouraged.

He was still there when I returned. A woman stood already waiting for the elevator, and his eyes zig-zagged over her. "Are you from L.A.?" he asked.

"No, but I love L.A.," she said. 

"Well, honey, I love how you work that outfit to cover your lower half," he offered.

"Um, thanks," she replied.

Then he looked at me again, his finger on a swivel. "Are you with him?"

She glanced at me nicely. "Nope."

He scowled at me and scanned my sodden jeans and soaked PF Flyers."Where are you from?" 

"Seattle." 

"I can tell." 

That's when my FU Meter blew its alarm, and the two pints I'd just knocked back helped hack up the words of my inner Don Rickles: "Does the hotel pay you to sit by the elevator and judge people, or do you do that for free?" 

The woman barked out a quick laugh, then swallowed.

He looked a little startled. "No." 

Good comeback, you skinny-jeaned halfwit. Thankfully, the elevator arrived and as the doors closed the woman and I looked at each other and proclaimed in unison, "Wow."

"He's an idiot," she said. "You look good."

"Thanks," I said, feeling grateful for her kindness, yet pissed at the preemptive attack on my personal appearance.

I won't burden you with each detail of our Portland trip, but I do want to show you one more thing. This is what I had for breakfast Sunday. It's called a Reggie:

It's a homemade biscuit containing fried chicken, bacon and cheese, and topped with gravy. Next time you're in Portland, stop by Pine State Biscuits—you might not see Jesus but you could at least bump into Mary Magdalene or Doubting Thomas mawing some fried green tomatoes—it's nearly that religious.

Just don't let the guy by the elevator see you eating the stuff.