Ok , it's now just after midnight on the day I had my colonoscopy and I'm still a little bit floaty from the Fentanyl I was given before my scope. (What is fentanyl? Fentanyl is an opiod pain medicine given to you as an alternative to sedation. ) And I'm sitting here thinking “dude you gotta write this down!”
Right so I bowel prep for my colonoscopy yesterday using Picolax, took the first sachet at about 11am, not to concerned about wether or not the instructions state that you should take the first one before breakfast, I've had it before, it's all good. Gulped the stuff down in one and washed my mouth out with coffee, and downed a pint of water. Job done… Had breakfast, opting for one of the low residue diets they recommend, hey I like boiled egg rolls anyway, it even says you can have a little butter with it as an added bonus, and went out to walk the dog around the woods a few times.
It states you should take the second sachet about 2 hrs after lunch, so seeing as I took the first one three hours later than the average breakfast time, I decided to take the second around 4pm. Not before having lunch.
I opted for the easy option this time as I couldn't be bothered with either steaming, poaching oooor grilling some fish or chicken with boiled potatoes, maaan that's something I would cook for a hearty meal, not the day before a scope. With all that inside me mixed with the Picolax, I'm gonna go of like Krakatoa.
I had 2 boiled egg rolls and my bonus butter ration instead.
A little tip for you here now,…. If the directions for Picolax states just before breakfast and 2 hours after lunch…It means it!
I was up most of the night shitting for Scotland, and to cap it all off, every time I fell asleep, the pouch would fill up with basicly water and keep seeping thro the filter soaking me about every hour or so. What makes it worse at 4 am it started bloody snowing!!
This scope I am having is the final wee test to erase my fears that I might have some kind of cancer in my spine. The places where I had fractured my neck and spine when was run over a few years back, were over the past 3 months or so, slowly starting to uncomfortably ache, the strange lump on my little finger made 2+2=5. The week before I had a spinal x-ray and bloods taken, and thankfully they had come back clear. The scope will tell if my any form of colorectal cancer had re-appeared.
Snow was the last thing I need, what if I can‘t get there, I‘ll have to wait ages to finally get the all clear…..
In the morning I take a shower, shave, apply nice smells as I'm going to be lying half naked in front of strangers, walk the dog and head for the 11:14 train to Inverness, the only one of 3 per day that leaves this tiny village, the one I have been taking to Inverness for the last however many years, the one that they decided as of the first of March this year to run 25 bloody minutes bloody early!!! I missed it!!!
No worries I'll get the bus that arrives in a few minutes time, change twice and yer at yer scope son. The bus takes ages to get to Inverness because of the snow, I'm sitting there realising there is no toilet during this hour and a half journey and praying that Krakatoa is not gonna erupt at some point during the trip, there is a young teenager and her drunk mother sitting behind me talking absolute rubbish to each other, pffff not a great start to the day.
So I get into Inverness, it's a quick walk to where I catch the bus to the hospital, by this time I am nearly 30 minute late for my colonoscopy, and every damn bus goes past but mine. There is also this old lady huddled in the bus shelter that makes for an excellent wind tunnel, stressing about her bus also and we make polite conversation, 20 minutes later I see my bus coming and I'm at Raigmore hospital.
I arrive at the day case unit, and there are just loads of doctors and nurses every where, I get processed for my scope by a student nurse who tells me that they are having a student training day on colonoscopies and would I mind being filmed during the scope, also I am told, my surgeon and his student colorectalists are in a lecture hall somewhere in the hospital doing a seminar on bowel diseases n stuff. She also asked me if I would like to be sedated, damn right I replied.
I asked her if she could take some blood samples from me and explained to her that in the post this morning I had received 3 blood sample kits, so my G.P or nurse take bloods for a cancer research programme that I volunteered for. It's the Colorectal Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Study, to see if they can trace a determined gene that may be a deciding factor as to wether you will develop colorectal cancer at sometime in your lifetime.
It arrived in the post this morning, I am going to the hospital, there's gonna be doctors and nurses there , get them to do it, easy peasy. Yes, if it had been a normal day in the sleepy old day care unit, but it wasn't was it, they had rung up loads of people with different kinds of bowel diseases especially for the student training day. One of the nurses after much persuasion finally agreed to do it for me and went about putting a canula in my vein and taking the 3, 9ml samples of blood required for the study to examine my blood DNA.
It went without hiccup and I wanders of back to the waiting room. And get this,!! the old lady that was huddling in the corner of the bus shelter also stressing about her bus taking ages to arrive was now sitting next to me, all gowned up as I am, telling me about her Ulcerative Colitice!!! I'm having a weird day!
An hour goes past still sitting in the gown, shivering slightly waiting for my turn on the telly when the colonoscopist asks me if I would consider not taking the sedative and perhaps take the Fentanyl instead, as my surgeon would like me to be awake for the scope so he can ask me questions during it. Man this day is just getting weirder and weirder. I agrees to the suggestion and I am taken for my scope.
In the scope room there is a few students hovering about waiting for their lesson on how to operate a scope, a fancy T.V camera on a pole staring at me and the others that are normally there during the proccedure, I get the painkiller and almost immediately I am as high as a kite and awake hehehe.
So the set up is as follows, my surgeon can hear me but I can't hear him, his questions to me are asked over the phone and put to me by a nurse. He can see me and the scope on the en of the camers and I can only see what the scope sees.
Questions like can you feel any discomfort, how does it fell when the scope turns a bend, when they spray the bowel with water, fill it with air, extract air basicly I was talking about the procedure all the way through it.
All of a sudden the nurse says “Mr Docherty wants to know where your ileocecal valve is???”, Like it was me that lost it or something!.
According to him it was there when I had my colostomy and urostomy formed. So I had to let him and the class he was lecturing, that during the constuction of my Indiana Pouch down in Edinburgh last year, it was used to create a living vavle on the inside of the stoma that I drain the pouch from to prevent leakage. Then proceeded to tell the students in the lecture room whist high as a kite on painkillers how an Indiana Pouch Constructed. What a weird old day
So I'm being driven home by my mum after we go for a bite to eat, as by now I hadn't eaten anything for over 24hrs and we get stuck in the rush hour traffic leaving Inverness. We were crawling at 2 mph for at least half an hour when all of a sudden we heard an ambulance coming up behind us, so every one moved to the side as the ambulance went past.
As it was passing us I said to my mum ”boot it mum” We were almost tailgating that ambulance thro the centre of the traffic and quite quickly we were back on clear road again heading home.
Thinking back on the sequence of events over the last 24 hrs or so, as an ostomate going for a colonoscopy, it is without a doubt well up the on my list of top 10 weirdest days.x
