Colonscopy - Prep Day Is Sh**

There is nothing more gruesome than Prep Day for the next-day colonoscopy. Nothing.

This is my fourth time. I should know all the ins-and-outs (sorry). Still, I read the instructions over three times so that I'd get it right. I prepared the icky Go-Lytely liquid and put it in the refrigerator that morning. I put everything out on the table: the pill I would take at 5pm. The instructions. The directions on how to get to East Bay Endoscopy.

At 5 in the evening, I took the pill. And half an hour later, I started the dreaded process of drinking one glass of Go-Lytely every 15 minutes. Hell, I don't even drink that much water during a regular day. Maybe if I did, well, that water is under the bridge.

Let me just interject that I don't know how those people who prepare Go-Lytely think that it's a lemon flavor they're giving me. If I were a lemon I'd be angry, very angry. It's more like a, say, dishwater-puke kind of flavor, not to be recommended.

I drank it all. Still, everything did not go well. I wasn't finished evacuating when it came time to get into the car and drive to the Endoscopy Center in Emeryville. I've been through this before, in a different way, when, a few years ago, I threw up and said to hell with it: I'm not finishing that horrible libation. As a result, the the pictures of my colon weren't clear. And I had to return a year later, do the whole thing all over again. I vowed that would not happen again.

Well, I got a slight reprieve. This time I did everything I was supposed to, but the results were still not clear. So I have to return in two years.

Next time I either need to start earlier or get a stronger laxative.

I'm still smiling, though: the results were super! No polyps in evidence. That's the good news.

And I have hopes that in two years they'll have developed an easier way of doing this.

Get started, scientists. You have time.