Men hate going to the doctor. Yeah, quite a revelation, right? Sure, it’s a cliché. But then again, why is a cliché a cliché in the first place? Because they’re so often true. Sort of like the French being snobbish, Yankee fans being obnoxious, or politicians caring only about re-election.
Me being a man, of course, I can say without hesitation that I indeed hate going to the doctor. Personally, the doctor always has been my boogieman. I spent way too much time during my senior year in college talking with doctors and watching my mother wilt away thanks to the insidiousness of colon cancer. She died at the age of 60 in 1987, back when colon cancer was almost always a death sentence.
So when I turned 40 and my doc told me to get checked, what did I do? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Yeah, I put it off nearly five years. What a moron. This move goes up there with Bush invading Iraq and TV execs pulling the plug on Arrested Development. But just a couple of weeks ago, I finally did the dirty deed.
Why did I finally take the, uh, plunge and have my hood finally lifted? Maybe it was the constant butt kicking from the wife. Maybe it was my 11-year-old little girl saying that she wanted to make sure I approved of her senior prom date (fat chance). Maybe it was my 6-year-old son saying that he wanted to make sure I saw him sign his letter of intent to play linebacker at TCU (only if Coach Patterson is still there). Regardless, it was an out-of-body experience just making the appointment, let alone picking up the secret elixir so pleasantly referred to as “prep.” For those of you who haven’t had a colonoscopy, prep is the drink you have to choke down on an empty stomach to make sure your colon is as clean as a BYU bachelor party.
The one upside of my night of “cleansing” was that I caught up on a ton of reading, including two full issues of Texas Monthly (the Best BBQ cover story really hit me where it hurts) and an issue of Consumer Reports (would testing two dozen outdoor grills really be that great of a gig?). I also lost 8 pounds. But this isn’t a diet book in the making. Not even for Oprah.
Now was the big day. What probably unnerved me most was that I had never been put under for any surgery of any kind. Everyone said the same thing about the process: You’ll get knocked out, and you’ll wake up a minute later and you’ll ask the doctor when he’s going to do the procedure although he’s long since finished. All true by the way.
I woke up to my wife telling me that my little guy fainted when he came into the recovery room and saw his daddy with oxygen in his nose sleeping on his side. He was fine once nurses found a juice box for him. I actually think he was just playing it up so that the pretty nurses would pay attention to him (that’s my boy).
A funny thing happened in the ensuing hour. I don’t remember a thing, including finally eating or how I got home. My wife informed me that I tried some 40-Year-Old Virgin humor on the nurse as she peeled some electrodes off my chest, but all I got was crickets and question marks (nothing new there). I’m surprised the wife didn’t take the opportunity to have me sign some sensitive documents or answer some probing questions. But maybe she figured I had enough probing for the afternoon.
The next day, I was sitting at my desk feeling as good as new. The nurse called with the results. One pesky polyp removed. No cancer, although they’d like me to come by in three years instead of five to go through this joyous occasion again.
Sounds like a date.
