Why You Should Poo On a Stick
Each time I have a new medical experience, I wish afterwards that I’d known more of what to expect. A decent chunk of the anxiety about hospital visits lies in the mystery. Francis Bacon wasn’t talking specifically about colonoscopies when he wrote, “Knowledge is power” but he probably would have liked a heads-up, too.
If you’ve never had one, think of me as your canary down the colonoscopy mineshaft. And if you have, high fives for resilience and doing the right thing - I hope this makes you feel seen.
I should clarify that a colonoscopy is different from a colonic – one of those things the “worried well” do as a cleanse, a sort of Marie Kondo-ing of their large intestine to flush out that which does not bring them joy.
A colonoscopy tends to come with a note from a doctor saying there’s something wrong and they’d like to know what. Mine was ordered because I failed the Bowel Cancer Screening Test, that little kit that comes in the post every couple of years to those of us over 58 years old. You dab a bit of poo on a stick in the privacy of your own bathroom (there’s an easy catchment process), pop the stick in a tube and take it in a return envelope to the nice lady at your Post Shop who definitely knows what it is but doesn’t bat an eye and wishes you a lovely day.
I love a screening programme. Finding things early is best. Bowel cancer is the second highest cause of cancer death in Aotearoa, and bowel screening aims to prevent an estimated 11,000 deaths over the next 25 years.
So I have cheerfully pooed on a stick every couple of years for a while now, to the point where it was a surprise there was anything amiss.
Failing the test doesn’t mean you have bowel cancer – my GP said this at least three times when she phoned me with the result. It can mean anything, she explained, from something as serious as cancer to relatively harmless like haemorrhoids, or something in between like polyps.
Spoiler: I had the “something in between”, and I’m all sorted, and won’t need another visit to the endoscopist for a while. Not that I don’t want to see him – he was very nice - and the procedure itself was a doddle given how pleasant the medical staff were and how floaty they made me.
The challenging part is the three days of preparation. It feels counterintuitive - two days of low-to-no-fibre, the plan being to eat food that doesn’t leave debris behind to confuse the camera. So white bread, no fruit or raw veg – overcooked broccoli gets a pass but not much else.
And then a day of fasting which culminates in drinking several litres of an oddly salty watery goop called Glycoprep which is not delicious, but which you can suck through a straw so most of your mouth doesn’t have to taste it.
The Glycoprep flushes out whatever is left – fast and furiously. Hilariously, my need to spend several hours in my bathroom coincided with our house painters outside reaching the toilet and bathroom windows, making what was already a discombobulating experience even more so with a man sanding the window frame just above my head.
Nailed it, though – they gave me a 9 on the Boston Bowel Preparation Score, the top possible score for colon cleanliness for the procedure. That and a clean bill of health made it all worthwhile.