i am jim's colon...
...and what a happy, pink, shiny, cancer-and-crater-free colon I am!
My closest associates and anyone who's had to spend more than six uninterrupted hours with me knows that since splatting out of my mom's va-joo-joo nearly five decades ago, I've struggled with what are known in polite company as "digestive problems."
I was unfortunate enough to be enter this tear-soaked existence in the early 1960s, when Beatlemania swept the nation with the same fervor as Enema Mania and Prune Juice Mania, and the cold sac of skin-around-a-womb that was my mother didn't like The Beatles.
Being plied with enemas and prune juice during infancy inevitably led to teenaged experimentation with wheat bran and Ex-Lax. Later in life I turned to the "harder stuff"—senna, psyllium, and, five years ago, the self-imposed rote humiliation of a high colonic—the dyspeptic's version of shooting heroin.
Dad shriveled into a dried sea horse a couple months before reaching sixty. A lifetime of alcoholism, cigarette-smoking, and fairly being bathed nonstop in carcinogens due to his dual jobs as oil-refinery foreman and journeyman plumber were not what killed him. Meat and potatoes, three times a day for fifty-nine years, sent him to a somewhat early grave. Colon cancer was the culprit—he had the big "C" in the big "C."
A dedicated Gentile hypochondriac, I was certain I would suffer the same fate, especially two or three years ago when I began issuing a charming series of pencil-thin stools, which one online site said "strongly suggests carcinoma."
Earlier this month I scheduled a colonoscopy with a tall, sweet-spirited gastroenterologist of African ancestry who claims to have performed 15,000 such procedures, making him the Wilt Chamberlain of colonoscopies.
Yesterday I consumed roughly three calories' worth of chicken broth and a gallon of laxative-laced Gatorade, squirting warm brown soup into the commode until the wee hours.
This morning Sha-na-noony left our infant son in the capable arms of her parents and drove me to the hospital. The intravenous anesthetic knocked me out roughly three seconds after I felt it warmly flowing into my veins. A half-hour or so later, I awoke to be informed that my colon was hearty, robust, and disease-free.
Celebrate with me, friends and enemies alike! I am Jim's colon, and I'll be issuing feces for a long, long time to come!
