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Bend Over

Sterling Warner

    There’s something unsettling about a guy who lights up like a boy playing with his first electric train set when inspecting one’s ass hole. I felt violated. That’s why I decided to buck past practice and seek-out a female general practitioner: Dr. Sarah Cranston.
    “How’s your prostate gland doing?” she asked the first time she examined me.
    “As a going concern or a conversation opener?”
    My new general practitioner slipped on her plastic gloves and applied a glob of translucent ointment on her index finger. Dr. Cranston completely ignored my flirtatious comment and attended to her work with authority and expertise.
    “Your 55? Let’s have a look she smiled mischievously, sliding her slippery finger up my rectum. “Feels fine, just fine,” she said, raising her index finger in the air, as if I could learn something from it. “Still, I want you to have a colonoscopy. I recommend you see Dr. Jarl Chadha, one of the best gastroenterologists in the Santa Clara Valley.”
    “Must I?”
    “Yes!” she firmly replied, adding, “If you like, I’ll give him a call; that way he might be able to see you next week.”

*    *    *

    Since midnight, I’d drunk a gallon of what I referred to as “shit juice,” the name appropriately delineating the effect of consumption. By my 9:00 a.m. appointment, I’d never felt so cleaned out. Later, when I took a bus to the clinic, I half expected to see Dr. Cranston chumming it up with Dr. Chadha, cracking butt jokes, and sharing observations. (I tried to keep my mind off the forthcoming rite of passage for those 50 something!)
    Entering the waiting room, I immediately noticed a 6-year-old child adeptly navigating an iPhone: texting, inspecting photos, and playing games. “Kids these days,” I thought, reflecting on the fact that I still only used my smart phone to call people. “By the time they’re my age, they’ll be performing their own colonoscopies with the same bravado they use snapping selfies of themselves.”
    The receptionist passed me several forms on a clipboard; promptly I filled out insurance information, an operation release, and other typical patient medical forms: Do you have abdominal pain? NO! Do you suffer from discomfort due to hemorrhoids? NO! Do you experience rectal bleeding? NO! Have you noticed any changes in bowel habits? NO!The list of inquiries about sinister symptoms went on and on, and to each I indicated NO! Then, I checked off what would be a guiding light for Dr. Chadha, my gastroenterologist: Are you 50 years or older? YES!
    In no time at all, people in scrubs ordered me to undress and don a hospital gown for the operation. I hopped onto the operation table as if I were swinging my body on a horse.
    “Please lie down on the examination table on your left side,” a nurse requested. When properly settled, she fed me sedative though an IV in my arm. “We’ll call Jean, your wife, when the procedure’s over; Dr. Chandha will want you to recover in waiting area for 10-15 minutes just to make sure that you experience no after effects from the operation.”
    “Why the IV,” I ask? “Pain?”
    “Not really—but the sedative will dull your senses and help you sleep,” she replied assuredly. Bullshit! I remained wide awake through the entire operation.
    Now, I was never one to check out my anus with a hand mirror—at least not in the same way I bore witness to my evolving reproductive organs—specifically my testes and penis—during puberty. Therefore, I watched the entire operation on a video screen, from the moment the doctor slid a colonscope up my rectum—which had a light and a video camera on its tip that projected images on a screen—until its removal.
     “What’s that? Dr. Chandha?”
    “Your colon and its lining, he said. “My colonscope allows me to identify any problems or remove abnormal growths called polyps—those white things right there.”
    “Interesting...and what’s that?”
    “Just a tube that helps me pump in air to inflate your colon so I can get a better view of it.” He turned toward the nurse and asked her to check the IV and make certain that I was still receiving a steady flow of sedatives—thinking I couldn’t hear him.
    The video screen continued to reveal a whole new world to me—not one I’d care to visit often—but still novel and worthy of my one-time attention.
    “Now, what’s that?” I asked Dr. Chandha, once again.
    He rolled his dark eyes beneath his glasses and replied, “It’s called a snare. It allows me to snip tiny samples of your colon—tissue biopsies—for examination and testing. ”
    After a 25-minute operation, someone rolled me into a recovery room where I had to wait 20 minutes to wake up from a sedative that had never put me to sleep in the first place. “You may have cramping or pass gas,” my nurse explained, a perverse smile on her, but these are normal after effects from your operation.”
    Twenty minutes later, after my wife had arrived, we had a private consultation with Dr. Chandha who clarified his observations, shared colored photocopies of various stages of my operation—particularly pictures of polyps he had removed—and explained that he would be sending any tissue or polyp he’d removed to a pathology lab just for testing.
    As we left the recovery room and prepared to head home, I became aware of my surroundings for the first time (perhaps the sedative had eventually found its way into my blood system?).
    “Am I imagining things, Jean?” I asked, looking around.
    “I don’t think so,” she replied, checking out the extended shelf I had noticed. “It’s just a model train running in circles around an electric track....”

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