Insides

It's Monday. I have to have a colonoscopy on Wednesday. Look that up and see if it doesn’t make you want to run screaming off the face of the earth. But I’m a middle-aged lady, and that’s what middle-aged ladies do. We go to some doctor, who tells us that a disgusting medical assault on our dignity is the only thing standing between us and grim death; and we say, "Oh, OK, by all means. Do schedule my appointment." I dread this the way I dread election season but I guess it’s better than being dead.

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? That paragraph, I mean. No time has elapsed and I’m not yet in the happy position of telling you all about the colonoscopy as an event that occurred in the past. Lucky for you, I won’t be telling you all about it at all, because it’s disgusting. It’s 8:55 PM now, so I’m going to have a snack, my last solid food until Wednesday.

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It's Tuesday now. I guess I've always wondered what cholera felt like, and now I know.

By the way, guess what I'm doing?

No, don't really guess. You don't want to know. The less said, the better.

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OK, the worst might be over. Drinking the solution was the hardest part. I had to drink a 10-ounce bottle of magnesium citrate this morning, and then the first of two doses of Suprep this afternoon. Both were vile, but the magnesium citrate was worse.

Now I'm just drained, very tired, and very cold. I'm in my bed, wearing flannel pajama pants and fuzzy socks. I'm reading and writing and looking forward to having this over with.

What am I reading? I'm glad you asked, imaginary person. I finally finished The Woman in White, and now I'm back to Nora Ephron, another book of essays called I Remember Nothing. I feel for you Nora. I can't say that I remember nothing, but I remember a lot less than I should. It's not so good.

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I'll write about The Woman in White another time, except for this one observation. I wouldn't want to be a woman (or even a man) in Victorian England, but it would be nice to be allowed to be sick for a day or so. Characters in The Woman in White are sent immediately to bed as soon as they sneeze. Meanwhile, I might as well have dysentery, but still I worked like a fiend all day.

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Reading Nora Ephron is like taking a class on the 20th century American cultural elite. You should always have easy access to the Internet when you read Nora. You'll probably need to look some things up.

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I need to Google Lillian Ross. Nora obviously thinks that I should know who she is. My next dispatch will be from the other side of this dreadful procedure. Until then.

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It’s Wednesday afternoon now; and I’m home, free from the clutches of the medical establishment, for now. It wasn’t that bad except that I woke up during the procedure; and judging by the astonished look on the anesthesiologist’s face, that wasn’t supposed to happen. But it went well otherwise.

I finished I Remember Nothing. And it turns out that just like me, Nora also hated the end of summer. And she worried, as I worry, about the ridiculous and sometimes cruel effects of aging. She worried about the inevitable decline. One day you can’t remember things; and the next day, you can’t see things; and then the rest of your life is a series of infirmities and indignities.

Nora Ephron’s life was so different from mine; and she was so much more fearless and sophisticated and accomplished than I could dream of being. She probably wouldn't have had much patience with me. But reading her feels like reading emails from a friend. She died in 2012, so sadly, there won’t be any more Nora Ephron books, but there are a few that I haven’t gotten to. I’m going to read Heartburn next. But first, I'm going to go to sleep for a while. I feel strangely groggy.