Big Chunk O' Me, Part II: The Intestinal Super-Expressway

So did you read part one?

When we last joined our hero, he was... aagh, I can't talk about myself in third person this whole post, it would drive me nuts.

Anyway, so I passed all the requirements, and was ready to go. They gave Corinna and me an early October date for surgery. There only ripple that came up was Hurricane Juan. The worst storm in Nova Scotia's recorded history, which blasted the CRAP out of us. And did some major damage to the roof of the building where we were supposed to have my surgery. Eventually, they repaired the damage, and cleared the backlog, and it only cost us about a month. Our new date was set for November 17th. Which, I believe, was a Monday.

The Friday before surgery, I went to the hospital to get my instructions, and other stuff which we'll discuss later. On my way, I couldn't resist dropping into the transplant coordinator's office. Rachelle, my coordinator, was out of the office, but the other coordinator, who I also liked very much, was there.

I walk into the office, and the woman greets me with a "How are you doing" kind of greeting. I blurt out:

"I'm sorry, I just can't go through with this!"

She had an "Oh. My. God." look on her face, but without missing a beat, she said, "Um, that's all right. Uh..."

I couldn't let her twist for long, though. I immediately said, "It's ok. I'm just f*cking with you." I *think* she was relieved, and possibly even slightly amused, but who can say for sure?

Having given in to my evil urges and joked about something that probably shouldn't have been joked about, I was woefully unaware of one of the basic tenets of life:

Karma's a bitch.

Fast forward to the day before my surgery. (The night before was my wife's Christmas party. The spread of food had been AMAZING, which would have been good except that I HAD ALREADY STARTED FASTING AND COULDN'T EAT *ANY* OF IT. Which totally sucked. ) Here comes the part that I don't think I adequately mentally prepared myself for, and which, in this household forever more, is a banned phrase:

Bowel prep.

Know what that is? In my case, it was a foul fruity tasting liquid, clear in colour, which I was supposed to drink a cup of every single hour for.. um... ever, I think. Supposed to "clean me out" for surgery. They told me to keep it chilled in the fridge, which would improve the taste. Well, let's just say that if that's the case, I'm glad I didn't drink it warm.



(It looked something like this... though I've tried to block out the memory)

I started off strong. The first one I gulped down. Second one, I don't think it slipped down quite so fast. Third one, I think I plugged my nose to try and reduce the foulness of it....

Oh, by this time, you know what else I'm doing?

Pretty much living in the bathroom, hanging on for dear life and trying to prevent all of my vital organs from rushing out of my butt along with torrents of... well, you get the idea.

And I'm supposed to KEEP on drinking that ... disgusting.... stuff. I'm being kind with the description. Adequate words fail me. Eventually, it was making me gag just smelling it coming close to my face.

I never did drink nearly all of the stuff I was instructed to. But let's just say I'm pretty sure that I was fully cleaned out. Just trust me on that one.

Eventually, my personal version of the white water rapids subsided, and my wife and I settled off to sleep in advance of our big adventure.

*******************************

Part three coming up. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.