I was reading about colonoscopies over on the Sarcastic Journalist’s blog and it reminded me of the one I had a few years ago.

At first, it was typical. Drink the laxative the day before. Turn inside-out on the toilet. Get it all clean and stuff.

Then show up at the clinic, where the fun times begin.

Be shown where to take off all your clothes by a girl who made a D- in your remedial reading class. Hand her your underwear in a little mesh bag. Thank her for giving you a gown which is the general size and shape of a pot holder. Hope she isn’t remembering the comment you wrote on her report card that one time.

Walk out into the room where an old man is sitting on a bench waiting for his wife to get dressed. Try to avoid his eyes. Try not to listen to him wheeze and cough. Try to erase the image in your mind of him sitting behind a desk teaching you Personal Health thirty-five years ago.

Lie down on a table, where a girl you secretly nicknamed “Dumbass Debbie” fifteen years ago will stick needles into your arms and send drugs flowing through your veins. Smile and make small talk with Debbie, and try not to remember how she probably couldn’t spell “needle” on the best day of her life.

Have pulse checked repeatedly by a boy who knocked up two different girls his sophomore year of high school.

A woman is mopping the floor and humming loudly. She leans the mop against the wall and wheels table into examination room.

Lie helplessly on the table and listen to a tv in the next room playing the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies.

When the song stops, the door opens and the doctor enters. He calls you by name, and asks you how you’ve been all these years.

Try not to picture hin sitting across from you in study hall, copying his math onto his forearm, before his big test. Try not to think about the day he asked you to the prom and you turned him down even though you didn’t have a date yet but not going at all was better than going with him because the very thought of him touching you was too gross to contemplate. You think about what he’s going to do to you, and contemplate death.

He pulls out a big piece of rubber hose. He tells you the joke about the constipated cow. You both laugh. He promises you that this particular hose was thoroughly rinsed with good cold water. He laughs at all his own jokes. Just like he did in study hall.

The colonoscopy begins. You watch it on a little tv screen. The theme from the Beverly Hillbillies starts up again. Your colonoscopy is keeping time to it. The doctor is reminding you of that time you turned him down for Prom. You both laugh. Neither of you sounds amused.

You are at the mercy of a guy who cheated all through math yet somehow made it through medical school, the class gigolo, two girls who tied for class moron, a wet mop, and a piece of rubber hose which you keep picturing being used on a constipated cow.

After it’s over, you want out of there so badly, you try to get up too soon and pass out cold.

A girl who refused to dress out for PE because of her religious principles tells you that you can’t get up from the table until you fart out all the air that was pumped into you for the colonoscopy. She will not allow you to try to do this in the bathroom. That would require getting up. She tries to help you fart by pushing on your stomach.

You hear yourself begging the mop-lady, the two morons, and the gigolo, to please let you go to the bathroom and fart.

Finally, they do. You do.

Your husband wants to stop at Steak and Shake on the way home. So do you.

You don’t use your straw, though.

The End.