Sedation or Gas and Air? My Colonoscopy Experience

Should you have sedation or gas and air? My Colonoscopy Experience

Have you ever had a colonoscopy? It's a medical investigation to visually inspect the interior of the colon or large intestine for disease, polyps or inflammation. It's also rather like the medieval torture of impaling, only instead of sticking a spike up your butt until it comes out of your mouth, they feed a camera into your rectum, all the way to the cecum - the valve which connects the small intestine and the colon, all in front of a small audience of doctors and nurses.

In reality it's not as bad as it sounds, though it's definitely a surreal experience.

The first thing you need to do if you are having a colonoscopy is clear your bowel. In the UK this is done at home using a strong laxative. I had an afternoon appointment so I drank my first litre of the tellingly named 'Moviprep' at 7pm the night before. At about 8pm I basically retired to the toilet for the night to begin spraying water and faecal matter all up the back of the bowl - nice! It's a strange sensation guzzling a litre of fluid, which tastes of Rennies and lemon - knowing it's essentially going to make you feel quite ill.

After finally running out of liquid to poop out, I retired to bed. I didn't sleep well that night. I was hungry and suffering minor abdominal pain from the brutally effective laxative I'd administered to myself earlier on in the evening. I got up just before 6am, to prepare myself a lovely breakfast of Moviprep! What followed was a similar pattern of drinking for about an hour and a half, then spraying more or less water and not much more into the bog for several hours. It got to the point where I felt dehydrated and wanted a drink, but when I drank any water, 5 minutes later I had to rush to the loo to squirt it out of my bottom.

Of course, as you aren't allowed to eat after 1pm on the day before your appointment, I was also starving when I set out for the hospital.

My appointment fell slap bang in the middle of 'visiting hours' so parking was a serious issue. It basically meant driving around for twenty minutes until I saw someone leaving, then waiting for them to go. Luckily I'd set out early and dropped the hammer once on the main road, using all 230 of my aging Jaguar X-Type's horses! Having parked I examined the ticket machine. It's one of those magic eye number plate recognition thingies, I wasn't sure how long it would take so I used the phone app to purchase the over 4 hours option. Cost me a quid extra, but I really didn't want to be on the table, heavily sedated, with a camera stretched right through the length of my gut when my phone starts beeping frantically, telling me I've run out of parking! In theory I could have asked a member of staff to hand me my phone so I could top up. But really - when you're lying prone, high on gas and air, experiencing the deepest anal penetration it's possible to experience, I can imagine you really don't feel like faffing about with phones.

By the time I'd sorted the parking out, gathered my stuff up, and found my way through the labyrinthine interior of the hospital to the Endoscopy Unit it was 3pm. My appointment was at twenty past, so I had time to book in, sit down for a quiet read and start mentally torturing myself - worrying about what lay ahead.

Before long a nurse arrived to admit me. I think she could tell despite my best efforts to hide my terrified state, that I was really apprehensive to say the least. She took me to an office, which was nice and cool unlike the rest of the ward. (She told me it was their only 'properly' air-conditioned room.) She went through a couple of forms and we had a chat about this, that and everything. I actually found I had a bizarre, almost unheard of connection to her. She shared my birthday and she had the same first name as my wife and my sister. Now when I'm at work and someone answers the phone and says, 'Martyn, it's [X] for you.' I could theoretically ask, 'Wife, Sister or Endoscopy Nurse?' however I think I'll stick to my usual 'Wife or sister?'

She asked me to explain to her, what I thought was going to happen today. I had to think about this for a moment, my banal and slightly aspergers mind rushing through, remembering and assembling a narrative that was as good a fit as I could get to what I expected. After a brief pause I answered. 'You're going to lie me on bed and pass a long, flexible device with a camera on the end called a colonoscope into my rectum. Then you're going to blow air into my gut and pass the camera up through the sigmoid, then forwards and around the front, down and back up to the cecum. Then you're going to withdraw it slowly examining the lining of the gut and taking biopsies if anything looks untoward.'