TMI and Stuff No One Likes to Think About

It's official.  I'll be going in for a colonoscopy in about a month.  Yay.  The peace-of-mind part sounds great.  Some members of my family have a genetic hiccup that makes us pre-disposed for polyps, so it'll be good to find out if I got dealt that card or if it passed me up.  The bathroom time (I expect I'll be reading rather than writing, and reading a lot) and the anesthesia, not so much.

At least it'll be a twilight anesthesia rather than general.  I'm not a big fan of general.

Anyway, I get to walk up to this particular milestone sooner than most.  I do hope that I can amble on by like most people.  But the fear--of discomfort, of complications, of what they might find--is very low key, and being a little nervous and then more than a little uncomfortable for a little while is a small price of admission to pay for life.  We're made of meat.  All of us.  Until someone comes up with a way to make that meat invulnerable, or makes our various parts easily and quickly replaceable, we gotta take care of the meat we got.

Every time I feed my goats and chickens (though Beatrice sometimes doesn't let me) I put my hands on them.  Are they thin?  Too plump?  Do they feel strong?  Are they bright-eyed?  When I come home from work I say hi to all the dogs and cats, and it's the same thing.

The sad thing is that I don't check myself over nearly so often.  Good thing that I have a working nervous system, or I'd never figure out when I'm hurt or sick.  Unfortunately the nervous system isn't hooked into everything.  There's a whole bunch of stuff that has few or no symptoms, and a whole bunch of stuff that has symptoms we can ignore or write off as our imaginations, or stress, or whatever. It's sooo important to get these checkups, whether you have insurance or not.

And that's another thing.  I think people are far more willing to spend a couple of hundred bucks (if they're lucky) on having their car checked when it makes a funny noise or doesn't steer right or blows smoke than they are to go to the doctor for the same or less money because they don't have insurance.  Really?  I wonder how much regular folks spend on pop in a month.  I don't drink it, but if I did, I might save the pop money for a few months and go to the doc instead.

Okay, that was totally self-righteous and catty, and I don't care.  Go to the friggin' doctor, people!  Save your pennies for tests and get 'em done.  If you're 'that age', better start saving more in the thousands rather than hundreds for those nasty tests like I'm going to have done.  But get it done.  It's a necessary expense like food, rent, etc.  And call your mother, for pity's sake.  Seriously.