On Friday, I had my first colonoscopy! It was quite the experience, and I am going to write all about it in this post. Be warned that I am going to talk a lot about bodily fluids, so if that isn’t your jam, you might want to skip it! (Also, I’m sorry this post is so damn long. I had a lot to say!)
(As a reminder, the reason that I got a colonoscopy before the recommended age of 45 is that I’ve had chronic diarrhea for about five months. Even though my grandma had colon cancer, the guidelines state that it has to be a first-degree relative to get an earlier screening. In any event, I’m happy I was able to “sneak” around the guideline because I’ve wanted a colonoscopy for a few years now. Not because I thought it was going to be a fun experience, but with my family history and seeing more and more people under 40 diagnosed with colon cancer, I felt it was important.)
A Week Before the Procedure
On Friday, July 11th, I had to start following some necessary protocols:
- No popcorn, seeds, or nuts
- No ibuprofen, naproxen, or aspirin (Tylenol is okay)
- No iron supplements, multivitamins, or fish oil
All of these were fine! I was a little worried I would accidentally take a dose of ibuprofen if I got a headache, but I never needed pain reliever, so I didn’t need to worry about that, thankfully. I was also worried about accidentally eating something with seeds. Bottom line is that these kinds of recommendations are not great for people with anxiety.
Two Days Before the Procedure
On Wednesday, July 16th, I was asked to take my first dose of Dulcolax, which is a stool softener. It was just two tiny pills, and while I had a little bit of stomach pain and diarrhea following the dose, it wasn’t anything major. I guess the benefit of dealing with chronic diarrhea for five months leading up to colonoscopy prep is that I have become used to all of that!
When I had my original appointment with my GI doctor and she ordered this colonoscopy, I was sent home with some paperwork on how to prepare. There was nothing in this paperwork about following a low-fiber diet in the days leading up to prep day. However, everything I read online said that you should eat low-fiber foods the day before. It’s all very confusing! I decided to do a low-fiber diet on Wednesday, even though I had not planned for it at all.
I didn’t eat as much as I should have on Wednesday because I didn’t really have the right foods stocked in my apartment. I had my typical eggs and sourdough toast for breakfast, a freezer meal for lunch (only ate about half of it because I had to pick around some of it due to my restrictions), and had chicken and rice for dinner. I stopped eating around 7 pm.
One Day Before the Procedure (AKA, Prep Day!) (AKA, The Worst Day Ever) (AKA, Everyone Who Told Me Colonoscopy Prep is “NBD” is a LYING LIAR)
Prep day was one of the worst days of my life. I hated every single minute of this day, and I cannot believe people told me it’s “not that bad.” (Thank you to Engie, who was very honest about how bad prep day can be!) My experience was more similar to hers.
I started the day with another dose of Dulcolax, and around 9:15 a.m., I had a delicious breakfast of lime Jell-O. Yummy! It did help curb some of my hunger pains, and I was able to do a little bit of work in the morning. (I took the day off, but since I had already been on FTO the week before, I wanted to be online and available for as much of the day as possible.) Then, around noon, I had lunch! This time, it was a lemon Popsicle. After that, I decided to try to ward off some of the hunger pains by taking a nap.
Around 3 pm, it was time to mix up my first Gatorade bottle! I had a 28-ounce bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade and my bottle of prescription Miralax. I had to pour 7 capfuls of Miralax into the Gatorade bottle. It would be useful to have a funnel during this process, which I didn’t have on hand. Instead, I used a small teaspoon to scoop out a little bit of powder from the capful at a time to pour into the bottle. (Which, yes, means it took forever to do this process.) I put the bottle in the fridge until it was time to drink it.
At 5 pm, it was time for my first drink! I had to drink 8 ounces of Gatorade every 15 minutes until I had finished the whole bottle. I used a mason jar that has ounce measurements on the side, so I knew exactly how much I needed to drink. I’ll admit that I was feeling A-OK after this process. I didn’t find it all that difficult to drink the whole bottle. I set an alarm on my phone for every 15 minutes, put on a YouTube video, and did some coloring while I waited for the alarm to go off. I could usually gulp down the 8 ounces within a few minutes, which gave my stomach time to settle before it was time for the next drink.
It took around an hour to get down the first bottle, and I was feeling just fine afterward. I decided to take a shower so I’d be fresh and clean for the doctor tomorrow (very important!) and then sat on the couch to watch an episode of Survivor. I should also note at this time that I was in the bathroom frequently. The goal for colonoscopy prep is to have light yellow or clear poops, which started happening early in the day (honestly, even before my first dose!), and by this time, it was just completely liquid and honestly felt really weird. It’s not normal to poop liquid!
At 7 p.m., I mixed up my next mixture of Miralax and Gatorade.
Annnnnd… this is where things started to devolve. I started feeling pretty awful, so I decided to eat a lime popsicle to see if that would settle my stomach. I only ate around half of the popsicle because it was just making me feel more terrible, and then I got incredibly nauseous. I stood over my kitchen sink with my head in my hands, trying to take deep breaths and hoping the nausea would pass. Usually, when I have these bouts of nausea, I can take sips of water to settle my stomach, but this time, I couldn’t even move because the nausea was so intense.
Thankfully, the nausea passed with some deep breathing, and at that moment, I thought about making myself some broth to settle my stomach, but when I realized a cup of broth was only 10 calories, I was like, “Not worth it.” In retrospect, I probably should have made the broth because it might have helped, but my brain cells were not working that day. Instead, I got some lime Jell-O, hoping that would help. At the very least, it had more calories than broth.
Reader, it did not help. Within minutes of finishing that Jell-O, I was violently ill. I am not a vomiter, so this was quite the ordeal for me. (The last time I vomited was 2020, and I was hoping to continue my streak for much longer.) However, throwing up did make me feel a lot better. I’m not sure why it happened, perhaps just too much sugar in my system at once (between 28 ounces of Gatorade, multiple cans of Dr. Pepper, and the Jell-O) or from the intense hunger pains. Plus, I’m hypoglycemic, so I often get nauseous when I haven’t eaten in a while.
Anyway, soon 8 p.m. rolled around, which meant it was time for my next Gatorade-and-Miralax mixture! This time, I went with orange Gatorade, hoping the different flavors would make things feel less terrible. The first two doses went fine. It was a little harder to get it down, just because I was so tired of drinking Gatorade by this point. My body wanted solid food! But then I took the third dose, and within minutes of finishing it, I was extremely nauseous and again got violently ill. By this point, I only had 8 ounces to drink, but I was really concerned if I was going to throw up that dose, too. Was it even worth doing it? I was pretty sure my digestive tract was cleaned out by this point, based on what was happening in the bathroom, but I’m also a rule follower and didn’t want something crazy to happen. Like what if I did all of this, only to find out they couldn’t do the colonoscopy?! (Which was a real fear of mine, made even worse when my mom told me it happened to her!)
I needed to finish the mixture by 10 p.m., so I still had about an hour to do that. I decided to give myself a half-hour break before drinking the last 8 ounces. I slowly sipped the last 8 ounces starting around 9:30 and thankfully, kept it all down. Whew.
After that final dose, I started needing the bathroom more frequently, so I parked myself on the toilet with a Survivor episode on the iPad and let things devolve as they needed to.
I did not sleep well that night. I was up every hour to use the bathroom, and then around midnight, I started to feel a headache coming on. NOOOO. I was instructed to stop all eating and drinking after midnight, and while I think I probably could have taken a Tylenol dose with a tiny sip of water, I was truly worried that if I did that, I would somehow delay my procedure, and I wanted to get it done ASAP. Plus, Tylenol doesn’t always work for my headaches, so the worst would be taking a dose and still having a headache. I decided to suffer.
Procedure Day
I was up early the day of my procedure. It was scheduled for 7 a.m., and I highly recommend scheduling a colonoscopy as early in the day as possible. That way, you’re not dealing with delays!
I barely slept the whole night and finally, at 4:30 a.m., I let myself get up and watch an episode of Survivor. Then I got ready and tried to tidy up the apartment (that was just a mess of Dr. Pepper cans and Popsicle sticks and Jell-O containers, lol) while I waited for my mom to arrive.
We arrived at the endoscopy center at 6:30 a.m., a full thirty minutes before they opened. Oops! We sat in the car for 10 minutes before we decided to go in and see if I could get checked in early. Thankfully, the center was open, and I was getting whisked back before 7 a.m. Yay!
The nurse checked my temperature, blood pressure, and pulse, and then had me give a urine sample. I was very nervous I wasn’t going to have any urine to give since I hadn’t had anything to drink in 8 hours, but my bladder came through just fine!
Then, I was put in a room where I undressed (I was told I could keep my bra on, but I went full birthday suit) and put on a gown. I stowed my clothes in a bag that was placed under my bed. Then the nurse came in and wheeled me straight into the procedure room. He got an IV going for me, which hurt a lot because he chose a vein on the top of my hand. He also added a nasal cannula, which would get me extra oxygen and help me relax.
And then we waited.
Because, you see, I had arrived so early that the doctor who was performing my colonoscopy hadn’t even arrived yet. LOLZ. What can I say? I was ready to get this over with so I could have solid food again! Thankfully, it wasn’t too long until he arrived (maybe 20 minutes) and then, the anesthesiologist was telling me to “think of a good dream” as she added that sweet, sweet sleeping juice to my IV. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a post-op room with a different nurse who was asking me to wake up.
Y’all. People are not lying about that colonoscopy nap. I was out and don’t remember a single thing. And the crazy thing is that once the nurse woke me up, I wasn’t even that groggy! The nurse told me my results—no polyps, no IBD (which rules out ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, thank God!), and they took tissue samples to test for microscopic colitis. (Different from ulcerative colitis; it’s basically inflammation of the large intestine.) She gave me privacy to get dressed, and then led me over to a chair and handed me a Nutrigrain bar and a cup of ginger ale. OMG, that Nutrigrain bar was the best thing I have ever had in my life!
The nurse walked me out to the waiting room where my mom was, and helped make sure I got into her car without any issues. And then we were off! It was around 8:30 a.m. at this point, so the entire process, from start to finish, took less than two hours. And that, my friends, is why you get the early appointment. I was first in, first out, no delays!
My mom said I could have anything I wanted for breakfast so of course I chose the best breakfast on the planet: McDonald’s! I had been dreaming of that post-colonoscopy sausage egg McMuffin for dayssss and I just wanted it ASAP. We went back to her house to eat and then I took a lovely 3-hour nap. (My mom wanted me to stay with her for a few hours after the procedure, as the anesthesia wore off, and I was happy with that plan, too.)
I am very happy to report that I had no problems after the colonoscopy! I didn’t even have all of the gas that is common after getting air pushed into my colon! I was sleepy (I took another 3-hour nap later in the day), but my appetite came back immediately, and I even had a bowel movement the same day. So even though prep day was horrible, at least I recovered quickly!
Final Thoughts
There were a lot of mistakes I made when it came to my colonoscopy prep that I will hopefully rectify in five years when I will have to do this all over again. (With my family history, I will need a colonoscopy every five years, and I have to do the traditional procedure—no “poop in a box” option for me!) First, I will eat much better the day before. I did not prepare for a low-fiber day and did not eat nearly enough calories to keep me fueled through prep day. Next time, I want to amp up the protein as much as possible so that I won’t be at a calorie deficit on prep day. Second, I will absolutely ask for a Zofran prescription to help with any nausea. This is something I want to recommend to anyone preparing for a colonoscopy. Even if you don’t think you’ll need it or aren’t prone to nausea/vomiting, just get a prescription and save yourself from feeling like shit all day long.
I’d also be better prepared with my food. While I bought broth, I never made it because I just didn’t have the energy to do so. Next time, I might prepare little Tupperware containers that I can zap quickly in the microwave. I’d also have ginger ale on hand to help with any lingering nausea.
What I will say about prep day is that drinking the mixture and cleaning out my colon wasn’t a huge deal. The powder dissolved pretty easily in my Gatorade bottle and was flavorless, so I didn’t taste it at all. And it didn’t feel chalky or anything like that. I should have gone for a lower-sugar variety of Gatorade, though, since I think all of that sugar in my system really affected me. And since I’m used to using the bathroom a lot on any given day, all of the pooping was a little annoying but not very bothersome. I didn’t deal with any booty pain, either. I’ve dealt with hemorrhoids before, and that was 1000x more painful than anything I experienced on prep day.
Anyway, as you can see, I am very open to talking about bodily fluids and what it’s like to have a colonoscopy! If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask. I never want to do this process again, but I also know I will do this process again and again and again, because I’ve seen what my grandma went through during the eight years she battled stage IV colon cancer, and that’s way, way worse than anything I went through last week.
