There’s no question about it, The Great White Shank has been extremely lucky, health-wise in his life. 51 1/2 years since my immaculate incarnation 🙂 I’ve never had to be under anesthesia for anything – no operations, no broken bones, no catastrophic illnesses (and you can believe I’m knocking three times on my wooden desk while I’m typing this) to speak of. But, things being the way they are these days, as soon as you turn the big McGarrett, you’re encouraged to have a colonoscopy done. (When you turn 51, that encouragement becomes a little more forceful recommendation.) So, after putting the damned thing off for as long as I could, I made the appointment, and today was the day. I won’t go into the gory details (actually, the only gory thing is what happens the day before your appointment when you spend the better part of the day in the bathroom while your colon is completely cleaned out), but I will say that the whole anesthesia thing was a VERY strange experience.

(Oh, while I think of it, for those of you out there in the same boat, do yourself a favor and schedule your colonoscopy for the first thing in the morning – that way, you really only lose one day of not being able to exist at least somewhat like a real human being.)

So there I was, lying there on the gurney thing with all sorts of monitors hooked up to me, and so far so good – I’m waiting for the doc to finish up with his previous patient. I find it interesting that I can use some of my long-learned TM techniques to change my heartrate almost at will, which is pretty cool. But the time for fun and games ends almost immediately when the doc enters, shakes my hand, asks me how I’m doing, and says we’re about to begin.

…next thing I know, I’m looking at the widescreen on the wall and being given a personal, up-close tour of my colon in living color. The doc says, welcome back, we’re almost through. Almost through, I think to myself – I didn’t know we had even started! I was told the procedure would take only 20 minutes or so, and here they are, finishing up? Where the hell had I been? I mean, it wasn’t like going to sleep, where you can feel sleep gradually coming on and you slide into it gracefully and comfortably. In this case, I was there one second and ‘out’ the very next – it was that quick. All I could think of was those X-Files shows where the common profile of those who had been the subject of alien abductions was that there had been 13 minutes of lost time they could not account for. Thirteen minutes? I figure the same thing (at least in terms of time) had happened to me.

There were few after-effects from the procedure. I took a nap, checked a few e-mails and am back among the living. While I certainly wasn’t scared before, I was apprehensive, but I know now it was for no reason. The day before was far worse than the procedure itself, and even that was more of an inconvenience than anything else (but what an inconvenience!). And, I have souvenier color photos of my colon on my discharge sheet at no extra charge!

All in all, an interesting experience. Anesthesia, huh? Go figure…