When it’s late January and you’re fifty and sitting sort of slouched in your black underpants on the rolled-out white paper that protects the exam table from whatever you might excrete, the doctor will tell you it’s time for a colonoscopy. You’ll hear the words vaguely because you’re busy trying to figure the appropriate age range for the wooden and plastic toys piled in the corner, beneath the framed Thomas and Friends growth chart. Before zeroing in on the colonoscopy word, you’ll remember that the only thing you ever had framed in your fifty long years was a limited edition broadside of a poem called “Ontology and the Platypus.”
Despite your admiration for the poem, the framing experience will have unnerved you, as all experiences at Michaels do. Why do people go there, you’ll wonder, “colonoscopy” still wafting about your brain. Every time you’ve done your fatherly duty and entered that store for yarn or beads or a plastic wreath ornamented with a nylon red bow, your stomach has roiled, as it does each time you search the metal bin in the pantry, trying to match a Tupperware to its lid. But then eventually “colonoscopy” will hit its mark, and an image will come to occupy your mind.
If you google “Katie Couric colonoscopy” you’ll emerge a couple videos later put off a little by the American can-do spirit. You’ll feel bad about yourself for feeling this, but what else is new? More importantly, though, you’ll realize just how old you are that you’re watching colonoscopy videos. It’s true you still change the station when NPR begins yet another Baby Boomer piece about health safety warnings or whether two glasses of wine or none is better or worse for your good or bad cholesterol, but now you’re beginning to wonder how long you’ll be able to hold out. How long until it’s you they’re talking about in their pledge drive promos, unable to leave your car until you’ve heard the end of the story, this one about new hospital procedures in Massachusetts regarding the aftercare of heart stent patients. The kids’ll be watching from the window.
“Why’s dad not getting out the car?” one’ll ask the other two.
Their mother’ll intervene. “Probably a radio story on heart stents,” she’ll say. “Let’s leave him be.”
The most astonishing thing about the money shot in the video is how clean Katie Couric’s colon is. That thing’s as pristine as you imagine her mind might be. And as the procedure occurs on camera, Ms. Couric is nothing if not her upbeat, perky American self, even in the face of a husband dead from colon cancer, even in the face of heavy sedation. I’ve forever wondered how American soldiers survived the battlefields of the First and Second World Wars. The older Americans I’ve known seem either too kind or too cranky to have been able to summon the combination of bravery, humility, and psychopathy required for, say, the Battle of Normandy or the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. But the Couric colonoscopy video recalls an old-timey American spirit animated by a bravery defined by staying true, no matter what, to how you want to be seen by others. Today, we might call it staying true to your brand. What’s astonishing, really, is how true Couric’s colon stays to her brand.
A lot of the time, you try to buy into healthier ways of thinking about your personhood in general and your body in particular. This effort can lead to, at times, whole series of days that might best be described as pleasant. You smile, laugh easily, and generally conduct your affairs with an air of levity. But because you know yourself better than anyone else does and because you’ve lived in and with your body forever, you know that you are, truly, beneath the Neutrogena and Aveda, a foul mess. When you were a teenager with a face and a back and a chest and an ass full of painful, constantly erupting acne pustules, you thought if you could only make it out of high school, the acne would go away and you could commence a regular life. But once the acne did (mostly) leave you, you began developing sebaceous cysts on your upper, inner thighs—in your freakin’ groinals, for God’s sake. Even now, intermittently for the last year or so, some infection no periodontist or doctor can cure, apparently, takes hold in your mouth for a week at a time. And none of that’s to mention all the belching, vomiting, pissing, coming, farting, and shitting you’ve done, all kinds of shitting, from diarrhea to clumpy turds to giant solid logs your colon could barely squeeze out your anus.
That’s just the bodily foulness. Never mind what goes on in your head. As Lloyd Bentsen might say, You’re no Katie Couric. And so once the word “colonoscopy” hits home, as you sit slouching at 50 in your underpants and beater on your children’s pediatrician’s exam table, the image that’ll come to occupy your brain will be ugly and the accompanying thoughts weighted with humiliation.
“March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month,” the pediatrician will say, cheerfully. “Let’s schedule it for then.”
Next time: Will strep throat doom the procedure? Can a colonoscopy make you a better American? What are the peculiar morphological features of the platypus’s intestinal mucosa, and do they raise questions regarding traditional concepts of intestinal gland formation? And, finally, OMG it’s true, it’s true: there’s a Colon who lives on Platypus Ln in Kissimmee!