add it to my medical resume

by the time i reach middle age, and require various medical tests and procedures, i am going to be old hat at almost any test there is! (by the time i'm middle age, we'll probably swallow pills with cameras that photograph our insides) this week i added "colonoscopy/endoscopy" to my medical resume, thanks to X-Man Stealth and my other GI woes.

the procedure itself was easier than getting an MRI- you lie in a comfy bed, don't have to wear a bra, are totally knocked out, and sleep through the whole thing! in my opinion, the doctors are the ones who have the short end of the stick- i sure as hell wouldn't want that job. the pre-procedure prep is easy as cake, too! (especially if you like lemon-lime gatorade, which i'm a huge fan of) you pop a couple pills to get things moving, then gulp down an 8oz glass of spiked gatorade every 20 mins for an hour or two. unfortunately, my pre-prep didn't go as textbook as preferred- the dr. told my mom afterwards that i wasn't cleaned out at all!!! so embarrassing! he said that they were expecting such an outcome and were able to "work through it". again, the docs def have the worse part of this deal!

did you know that your esophagus muscle can be weakened and cause acid-reflux like symptoms? (i asked. there are no exercises to strengthen this muscle.)

there are always precautions when dealing with anesthesia. to put it in layman's terms, it is physically manipulating your body's central nervous system- your body's entire communication network! as far as general anesthesia is concerned, it inhibits your brain from perceiving pain signals (or any other messages) from the nervous system (temporarily, of course.) we're talking big time stuff here, no matter how healthy or unhealthy the patient. throw in a medication list as long as a typical office memo, an influential fentanyl patch (loves to mess with your heart rate and can make sedation difficult), and an auto-immune disease that affects the central nervous sytem itself, and you have an anesthesiologist's dream patient .

unfortunately, my body didn't breeze through the post procedure like it did the pre-prep steps. i have been experiencing a level of exhaustion that i haven't felt in weeks- i can barely put one foot in front of the other, and have slept every few hours the past 2 days. when i woke up this evening from napping, i felt like i had been run over by a MAC truck- and served as a personal dance floor to King Kong. i've been in an incredibly pouty and snappy mood, and my level of patience is next to nothing. if things don't improve by Friday, i might give my GI doctor a ring- which means they will tell me to call my neurologist, who of course will say to rest and keep an eye on things over the weekend. see, i don't even need to call the doctor! i can already predict next steps. just call me dr. meggers.