Grapes of Strewth!

(Note - this is quite explicit.)

Hemorrhoids.

I had absolutely no idea what they were except as the butt of a joke from Austen Tayshus a very long time ago. It turns out that the slight lump in my bum was indeed the grapes of wrath (so called because the swelling going down looks like a bunch of grapes). Until I got up the courage to have my wife look up my back passage (standing in the front passage), I didn't realise that said lump was pressing on a nerve & was the cause of my sudden back pain.


Time to visit the doctor - preferably one I won't have to face again (& won't be facing this time).

A quick dose of embarrassment at the end of a rubber-gloved finger gave me the news: "You, sir, have piles!" He wasn't quite that chipper or polite, but I had to make allowances under the circumstances. He wrote down a cream named after my arse - easier to remember - & a letter of recommendation to a specialist ("patient has piles; your area of expertise, I believe").

It took two weeks to get into the consulting surgeon's offices, by which time my grapes had shrivelled down to sultanas under the brilliance of where the sun shines out.

It was a busy office. I was the last patient for the day, apparently, & had to wait more than hour for my appointment to be fulfilled, by which time I had noticed the misspelling of the surgeon's qualifications etched into the door, & discovered enough history to realise that I was not going to be dealing with a doctor, but a researcher who had decided to career change to surgery. Being South African, it would appear, a bedside manner was something for which my new rubber-glove-friend was neither qualified or trained.

I had prepared myself for someone tall, fair of hair & skin, & abrupt. I realised that I was still underprepared when I met her & remembered that I was soon to be her glove puppet.

She confirmed that things were "going along nicely" - although thankfully her practiced investigation while I was turned to the wall was even briefer than the GP's. She did however, suggest that "given my age" I should have a colonoscopy "just in case".

I made a booking as far away as I thought polite.

Unfortunately, even two months can skip past when you're ignoring the inevitability of people probing your nether regions while you're unconscious. You'll be asleep when they stick a tube up there, but you can well imagine just how long that thing is & how far up it's going.

I did not read the provided documentation until the last minute - that is, when I should have been putting things in play, like pre-admission for the hospital. The diet changes were minor - not even mildly annoying - but then there's the medicinal end of the procedural preparation.

MoviPrep.
It's as dramatic as hemorrhoids. A sentence in itself - in both the grammatical & sense of injustice.

The directions are almost threatening in their understatement - prepare the solution & chill for two hours. Chilling was the last thing on my mind as I'd already read humorous blogs relating the effects of this "solution". However, forewarned is ... simply another way to build up panic.

My first mouthful - & indeed hurried glassful - reminded me of L&P, that classic Kiwi drink. The second, not so. Successive glasses were increasingly more difficult to swallow between the effects
the product was having. One could say that the gap of thirty minutes between my first two visits to the bathroom was relaxing, but also not indicative of the power of this liquid to "cleanse the intestines".

I made a game of it - checking to see just how cleansed I was becoming, from passing a normally-brown-coloured wet stool, through to pissing out a stream of yellowish-not-quite-clear liquid through my mildly surprised sphincter.

It's not like diarrhea at all. It's very, very different. Diarrhea has your stomach behind it trying to get rid of stuff that could be bad for you. This is an indiscriminate eviction of all intestinal tenants.

In effect, I ingested two litres of "stuff", at least half a litre of water (to ensure non-dehydration?), plus my "meal" of (clear) chicken soup, over a period of less than five hours. My wife suggested it was so much liquid that I shouldn't rush it. My bladder was the least of my concerns.

Like contractions, the pain & exertion came more frequently until my labour was finally & suddenly over & I felt optimistic enough to sleep.

I went to bed in fear. I woke up in annoyance. Mostly, I was annoyed that I would have gotten up in half an hour anyway, so why my intestines decided that I needed one more burst of expulsion at that time was beyond me.

By comparison, the procedure itself was a dream.