The nurses said I woke up from the anesthesia of my first colonoscopy singing loudly. I asked them what song I was singing and they just shrugged their shoulders and laughed- looking amongst themselves like thieves. No one wanted to tell. Then, as I was getting into Liana's waiting car, a nurse said, "It was Ten in the Bed, except you kept singing 'Auggie Dog' instead of 'Little One.'" Then they all laughed heartily.

Unfortunately for my health plan, that's when my love affair with colonoscopies started. And luckily, I have a family history of colo-rectal cancer.

Sure, the night before the procedure is just pure awfulness; swilling glass after glass of high-strength laxative and diuretic pills that could drain Lake Ontario.

But that agony is only the night before. In the week prior, you can eat all kinds of zero fiber foods "they" are always warning you not to eat. Like scrambled eggs with gobs of cheese and potato chips, Twinkies, Econo-Paks of Little Debbies Nutty Bars, entire logs of sausage and chunks of barely-cooked bacon, two grilled 20oz Rib Eye Cowboy steaks without all those pesky potatoes, green beans, and other weird stuff like risotto and salad, and glasses upon glasses of zero-fiber Bushmills Irish whiskey. Colonoscopy week is also the week of the year when I consume the most Marshmallow Fluff.

Yet right before my second colonoscopy, professional Wet-Blanket and Wife Liana pointed out to me that my self-designed Zero-Fiber Diet was comprised of those very things that cause colo-rectal cancer.

I responded by saying that my as-yet-colonoscopy-free wife was in no figurative or literal position to judge my pre-colonoscopy menu decisions. Didn't she know doctors were avowed sadists and enjoyed depriving honest people of comfort unless they were really dying or dead (The Patients, Not the Doctors).

Those same "qualified" Docto-Sadists recommended I eat things like Jell-O, Wonderbread, plankton, Formica, steamed rice cakes, driveway gravel, spackle, weak broth, and ice cubes for a week. If I got hungry I could gnaw on an ungalvanized solid-steel bolt.

Somehow our marriage survived the night and Liana carted my irritable, fiber-free colon to the correct place in the hospital for my procedure for the second time. I couldn't help notice she didn't bring her coffee mug this time.

Why is this significant? On the way to my first colonoscopy I snuck one literal sip of her black coffee when she wasn't looking. When a nurse asked me right before the procedure whether I had anything to drink in the last 12 hours, like an idiot I said, "A sip of black coffee."

That set the beehive of nurses on red alert. I was removed from the first colonoscopy slot and put to the last. Nurses tsk-tsked me with sad, fleeting eyes and took my temperature over and over rectally.

Hahaha! Just kidding! They had one of those new-fangled things that looked like a Star Trek phaser and took my temperature from my forehead. Like it mattered, considering what I was there for.

Liana just glared at me. She was incredulous that for once in my life I told the truth to an authority figure. And to a low-level authority figure at that. That one stupid truth cost her an additional two hours at the hospital for my first colonoscopy, and her morning coffee on my second colonoscopy.

I'd like to say I was anesthetized for those two hours while Liana had to wait, but I wasn't. Liana was seething right next to me the entire time.

I began to have paranoid thoughts that during my procedure she would spitefully crash her car into an abutment or rob a bank just to leave me at the hospital without a way home.

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On my second colonoscopy, I remember coming out of anesthesia talking about the Infield Fly Rule and Harold Baines. It wasn't nearly as funny or engaging to the nurses. I was a one-shot wonder. I was washed up. My colonoscopy comedy routine was over. Was it because I didn't have any illegal coffee this time? Only next time would tell.

They wheeled me to Liana's waiting car and promptly and professionally disposed me to her front seat.

Liana drove us back to the Southport cabin she had thoughtfully stocked with a bunch of stuff like yogurt, salad, baked beans, whole wheat bagels, peanut butter, mashed potatoes, and Auggie.

No. I didn't eat Auggie.

–Don (Not a Dog)

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