[Editor's Note: Jack Grisham is an author, hypnotherapist, T.S.O.L. front man and all-around troublemaker. This column, True Story, may or may not be factual, with characters who may or may not be real.]
I've lived a lifestyle that has been characterized by defiance and reckless abandon. I've been ice-picked; razor-bladed; car-crashed; pumped full of poison in both pill and powder form; and ingested more than my share of the narcotic alcohol, including a few hundred gallons of good old MD 20/20–a wine that surely has never seen an actual grape.
The thing is, I didn't expect to live this long. I never thought I'd have children or people who really cared for me; I never thought I'd fall so in love with life that I wouldn't want to leave. I never thought I'd marry a woman who was so concerned with keeping me around.
“Sweetheart?”
“Yeah, Baby?”
“I want you to get a colonoscopy.”
]
“You want to wait until the kids are gone, or do you want to sneak into the garage?”
“I'm not kidding.”
“Baby, I don't need a pipe up my ass. I'm fucking indestructible. I'm a machine; I'm an animal. I'm–“
She picked up the phone and started dialing. “Do you want to see him in the morning or the afternoon?”
The doctor was kind enough–some Indian cat who kept making ass jokes, and I was given a date for the procedure and a prescription for a laxative and a 4-liter bottle of human Drain-O. I was also given detailed instructions on how I was going to get “cleaned out.” Now, I'd heard the prep for a colonoscopy is worse than the test itself, but it wasn't so bad. Yeah, the drink tasted like lime-flavored anti-freeze, but it wasn't unpleasant to an ex-“Mad-Dog” drinker. And the constant trips to the toilet weren't so bad, either. The whole prep thing was like a weak Tijuana hangover–just the shits with no headache or jail time–and in a sick way, I kind of enjoyed it.
After I was thoroughly cleansed, I checked in at the surgery center. There was a queue of patients waiting to get probed, and I took my place in line. The nurses slapped me into a backless nightie and rolled my bed right into the procedure room. An I.V. was popped into my hand.
“I'm a bit nervous,” I said.
The anesthesiologist leaned over and smiled.
“You're not nervous,” she replied. “You're just not in control, and it frightens you.”
“What the fuck? I'm not here to get analyzed; I'm here to get . . .”
. . . I woke up.
I don't know if you've ever been Propofol'd, but that shit is heavy. I was out, and then awake, before I even had a chance to complain. And my procedure? It was over. That's it–knocked out, violated and released. It was no big deal.
I've come to in all sorts of situations, but this is the first time I ever came out of a blackout doing something positive. My colonoscopy reduced my chance of death by colon cancer by 53 percent, and my wife couldn't be happier.
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