39 today, or, Why should Jay Lake have all the fun?

As you approach your 39th birthday, discovering blood in the toilet after you've used it, as a general rule, is not a good thing. If you mention this to your spouse, or mail carrier, or the garbage collector, they're all going to tell you to go to the doctor (right after going "Ewwwww!"). The trouble with this line of reasoning is, when you tell this kind of thing to doctors, they start throwing words around like "Colonoscopy."

Let me tell you here and now friend, that is an evil, evil word.

Not because of the colonoscopy itself, mind you. They pump anesthesia into your veins and you sleep through the whole thing. No biggie. The evil part is the preparation: A "low residue" diet for several days prior, followed by clear liquids the day before, and starting the evening before, more evil laxative consumables than any human beings should ever face. Normally, the laxatives are consumed over something like a 12-hour period. Take the pills (including anti-nausea medicine) and drink half a gallon of a nasty Gatorade/urine/Epsom salts cocktail, then repeat the process in the morning. Only my scheduled colonoscopy time was moved up, so I had the pleasure (and use the word in a pejorative sense) of drinking it all--and entire gallon--in one sitting.

The famed Jay Lake, of course, is familiar with some, or all, of this. He was far more dramatic about it, however, arriving at the hospital in a state of near-death where the crack medical team discovered that Jay was harboring a cancerous polyp in his innards. Jay, being the relentless showman that he is, immediately commissioned a puppet based on the antomical intersection of life, death and the absurd.

I ask you folks, how can I compete with that?

Short answer: I can't.

I don't have colorectal cancer, which is just as well, as mine would simply be a watered-down interpretation of Jay's. He did it first, and is the one all other literary colorectal cancers would be compared to. Besides, I couldn't get a puppet out of the deal without being accused of copycat status, so what's the point?

The bleeding was caused by an internal hemorrhoid. Pretty anti-climactic. Particularly since there's no other discomfort and not really any treatment they can offer me. I didn't even have any polyps.

The one cool thing they found isn't really cool at all. It's pretty marginal as far as diseases/ailments/disorders go. I have diverticulosis, by virtue of a single diverticuole they discovered way up in my intestine:



This, in case you're wondering, is sort of like an anti-polyp. Whereas polyps are abnormal growths inside the intestine, diverticulosis is an abnormal growth outward from the intestine. Kinda like a spontaneously generated appendix. You know, in case my actual appendix goes on the fritz and has to be removed, this will give me an optional useless piece of gut that can potentially become infected in the future. At which point I'd be diagnosed with diverticulitis. Sound familiar? If you were a fan of Saturday Night Live back in the 80s when Joe Piscopo and Robin Duke played Doug and Wendy Whiner in a recurring series of sketches in which the couple (naturally) whined about everything in annoying, nasal voices, including the fact that they suffered from "DI-ver-TIC-u-LI-tis!"

At this point of the blog, the normal practice is to end with a YouTube link to one of the Whiner sketches and end with a laugh. Except I can't do that. Apparently Joe Piscopo's longest-running character bit on SNL isn't popular enough to be pirated on YouTube (or anywhere else for that matter). So my one tangential bit of pop-cultural relevance is a dead end. And Jay gets a puppet.

Figures.

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