Thankful Thursday

[mdlbear]

Today I am grateful for...

• Having a successful colonoscopy on Monday. Thanks to the three-day prep. Which is, thankfully, over.
• Fiber (having been on a low-fiber diet last Thursday through Sunday). The less said about clear liquids the better (but see below).
• Coffee being considered a clear liquid. (But not gin.)
• Gin. Olives. A refrigerator with an ice maker. Hold the vermouth.
• Having good things to read (= rabbit holes to fall into). NO thanks for being a fairly slow reader -- the rabbit holes last longer, but that's not necessarily a good thing.
• Desktop trinkets and widgets. Desk space (what I have of it -- more would be good, but...).
• Disk space. Or actually, data storage space, which continues to decrease in price despite the (ostensible) death of Moore's Law. Two terabytes should be enough for anypne, right?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I think if they didn't consider coffee a clear liquid, there'd be riots. Riots, and a lot of No-Doz prescriptions. (It is not normally prescription.) We keep it on hand because I used to use it for ADHD, and my partner still sometimes uses it as a sleep aid.

[mdlbear]

When I had a sigmoidoscopy a quarter-century ago, I don't think they did.

[kengr]

Two terabytes should be enough for anyone, right?

*snicker* The box I'm on right now has *two* 2 TB drives. I've got three NAS boxes. 2 have 4 TB drives, the third has a 16 TB.

And I have keep an eye on free space.

Of course, much of what I've got on them are movies, TV shows, etc

[mdlbear]

Yeah; I'm finally getting around to upgrading my laptop to 2TB; my file server has been there for several years. But I don't have a lot of video on it -- yet.

[acelightning73]

I couldn't drink the full quantity of prep liquid. Every mouthful I swallowed would just come back. The doctor told me she didn't get a clear enough view because I hadn't drunk the entire quantity of liquid. So she wants me to do the whole rigmarole a second time. I have heard rumors that there are easier ways to do this. I need to find out what they are,and how to get it done that way.

The moment I woke up from the anesthesia, she asked me how I felt. I said, "I'm tired - I had to get out of bed every couple of minutes to pass more liquid", "I"m hungry - I haven't eaten any solid food except my edibles for three days. And "My asshole hurts" - she had removed a hemorrhoid. No matter how much you disliked it, I SYMPATHIZE

[mdlbear]

Much sympathy.

I've found that PEG3350-based (Miralax on steroids) preps are the easiest to take, because the stuff's tasteless. That includes the one that comes in a gallon jug you have to fill up with water. This one was Suprep, a mixture of magnesium, potassium, and sodium sulfates, and even diluted (10oz of water to 6oz of mix) it was ghastly. Then followed up with another quart of clear liquid -- I used apple juice for some of it.

One thing that worked in my favor was the 3pm appointment, which meant that I could take the first batch of prep at 3pm the day before, so I wasn't getting up quite as often to piss. Not quite often enough to keep me from waking up in a small pool of sewage at 6am.

But the two months between my diagnosis and when the androgen blocker kicked in, when I was self-catheterizing three times a day, were worse.

[acelightning73]

I had the Cologard kit, which contained bottles of concentrated electrolytes solutions I had to dilute. Considering my heart arhythmia, I was worried about all that sulfate fucking with my electrolyte balance.The cardiologist noted that my EKG got a little weird during the procedure. And my digestion took four days to return to normal.It turns out that the Cologard process is highly inaccurate, and relies on those electrolyte mixtures to clean you out.

I remember reading about "virtual colonocopy", done with an MRI scanner. It supposedly is like flying a drone through your intestines. I need to see if they still do that. And the doctor also wanted to do an endoscopy (tube down through stomach to inspect the entire digestive tract, I have a sensitive gag reflex, and they had to do something for that when I had all the dental work. I'm sure I'd have real trouble swallowing a fiber-optic camera probe.

colonoscopy song

[patoadam]

Congratulations on your successful colonoscopy. Here's a song about that: https://www.thrinberry-frog.com/VirtualSongbook/ANoteOfThanksToDrRees.pdf

Re: colonoscopy song

[mdlbear]

Thanks, and thanks for the song.

My first procedure was a sigmoidoscopy. It was very uncomfortable. A full colonoscopy is done under anesthesia, and looks at all three segments of the colon. (You probably already know that.)