Doctors recommend that anyone reaching the age of 50 should have a colonoscopy. Vindictive, self-destructive cells tend to start to appear in our intestines around this age, so it makes sense to send a camera up there to provide the doctor with a Jonah’s eye view. But then again, doctors recommend many things that we ignore. I have managed to avoid a colonoscopy until 54, but I finally found myself on a table in my doctor’s consulting room recently, ready to face the music. In fact, most of the music had played the day before, but I am jumping the gun.
I have a historical dislike for hospitals because of childhood trauma. My reasoning was that all medical appointments had a good chance of starting the clock on the beginning of the end, so it’s tempting to put your head into the sand — clutching your crystals and your horoscopes, and crossing your fingers — and avoid doctors at all costs. And, if you end up dying, at least you won’t have had to face the disease, or endure all the disappointments and sad meetings with doctors and family about the inevitable failure of the medical intervention.
While death is inevitable, we seem to spend most of our lives in denial of this.
Two recent visits to the Mediclinic Cape Town Hospital in the past year, however, have changed my mind. The hospital is situated on the leafy slopes between Gardens and Oranjezicht, with De Waal Park and tennis courts on one end. It feels like a pleasant place to be cured. I imagine the Earth’s energy lines run strongly here. And, of course, there is unfettered access to the pleasant haze of opiate painkillers. I spent hours lazing in shallow dreams punctuated by the rhythmic plop of tennis balls striking racket strings.
My doctor is a kind bloke with a nice face who takes his Hippocratic oath seriously. He gives me a hug and doesn’t shout at me for being overweight or drinking more wine than I admit to in the form. He understands that these are stressful times, and we all need a release from the relentless chaos. I have come to the slow realisation that he is here to save me rather than relay ghoulish news about the impending appearance of the Grim Reaper.
Back to my colon. A colonoscopy requires the patient to simultaneously fast and clean out their intestine with a white substance that comes in sachets in a strict schedule the day before the procedure, so that the doctor with Jonah’s view on the camera can take a good look around for polyps or other sinister examples of our bodies turning on ourselves.
Amateurs on the internet have devoted hours to describing the explosive hours spent enduring this process. I found them to be exaggerated. And as Oom Schalk Lourens reminds us, it is vital in storytelling to know which parts of the story to leave out.
Suffice to say, I have had far worse experiences in this regard, particularly in a boarding house on Lake Malawi, where the facilities were located on one end of a busy corridor, and only provided the bottom part of a stable door to secure one’s modesty.
I have no recall of the process itself, having been anaesthetised by a delightful looking anaesthetist. It was all very pleasant, and I even tried some charm, before I realised where the scope was about to go. But before I could concern myself too much about that, I was in dreamland, with the tennis balls.
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