Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The Lord aroused against Jehoram the hostility of the Philistines and of the Arabs who lived near the Cushites. They attacked Judah, invaded it and carried off all the goods found in the king’s palace, together with his sons and wives. Not a son was left to him except Ahaziah, the youngest.
After all this, the Lord afflicted Jehoram with an incurable disease of the bowels. In the course of time, at the end of the second year, his bowels came out because of the disease, and he died in great pain. His people made no funeral fire in his honor, as they had for his predecessors.
Jehoram was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eight years. He passed away, to no one’s regret, and was buried in the City of David, but not in the tombs of the kings.

• 2 Chronicles 21:16-20

If you do an internet search of the word “colon” in the NIV, you get a few references to “colonnade” as in Solomon’s Colonnade, and a New Testament reference to a Roman Colony.  There is nothing about the large intestine.  But you look for “bowels” and you get the story about bad king Jehoram.

Of course, king Jehoram was the son of Jehoshaphat, a good king of Judah, but Jehoram was married to the daughter of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel of the northern kingdom.  If you think Jehoram was bad enough to not be buried in the tomb of the kings, then Ahaziah was bad also, but after a short reign, Jehoram’s wife Athaliah, murdered all those in line to become king and she became queen of Judah, except she missed Joash, spirited away by the high priest, and anointed king when he turned six-years-old.

Yes, this was a tumultuous time in Judah, not to mention the northern kingdom.

But this story about bowels is only a story to introduce my recent colonoscopy.

My point of the title is that colonoscopy is not a four-letter word, but maybe it should be.

For a week, I was supposed to eat “soft foods.”  The instructions told me what “soft foods” was not, but never what it was.  I ate mostly soup.  I enjoy gelatin desserts, so I started that early.  And I ate a lot of canned fruit, mostly peaches and pears.  And that was it until the last day when I was allowed gelatin and broth and clear liquids, and only things yellow or green.  I had three huge bowls of green gelatin.  Yummy!  Okay, I was so sick of the stuff, I had half of the last bowl left over.

That night, I had the medical preparation.  As Howard’s mother said on an episode of the Big Bang Theory, “I’ve got an upside-down volcano here!!!”  If you have ever had this aggressive form of laxative, designed to completely cleanse the colon, you know what she meant.

They performed the colonoscopy the next day, and they found nothing.  The doctor reiterated “NOTHING!”  I think he was commenting on my health first, but also the complete cleansing of the colon, no residue.  I am pretty sure he found the colon.

But this entire time, I was reminded that my wife had a colonoscopy in March.  She had a heart attack that afternoon that was later called a combination of dehydration and taking a nitroglycerin pill which made her faint – so why did she have the heart attack enzymes in her blood?

As they focused on the aortic valve that had been replaced by open-heart surgery, they saw it was not opening as it should and by the wee hours that Sunday morning, she had passed away.

In all of this, the colonoscopy was forgotten.  It was a heart valve problem that they thought could keep going for at least a couple of weeks, and they were wrong.

But a friend had driven me to my colonoscopy, due to the medication I would receive, and she drove me home.  I wobbled around and did not get much done that afternoon, nor the next day.  I had to chuckle.  She asked me before she drove away what my plans were.  I told her reading and writing.  Since driving a car for the next 24 hours was not allowed, she was satisfied and left me on my own.

But late that afternoon, I got a tightness in my chest that I had never had before.  It was not pain, but it was hard to breathe.  Maybe shortness of breath or maybe the elephant should have sat on someone else’s chest for a while.

I thought of my wife and her heart attack just hours after she returned from her last colonoscopy.  Then a voice in my head said, “She had a heart condition, and you supposedly have a type of atrial fibrillation that is not the ‘dangerous’ kind.”  I lay in bed and thought about breathing, “inhale, hold it, exhale, hold it” and on until the elephant got bored and went somewhere else to sit.

But in my mind, here I was feeling my A-Fib for the first time due to the odd mixture of circumstances after a colonoscopy.  Your entire intestinal tract is empty.  Note: My seven-pound weight loss that week has led to an eight-pound weight gain in the four days since (as of writing this).  You have voided well over a gallon of fluid from your body over the course of 4-5 hours, and your blood may be a little dehydrated.  As I did the night before, I had roughly an hour and a half of sleep, since I kept having the urge to run to the bathroom all night long.  And that twenty minutes that I was out during the procedure should not count.  Honestly!

Yes, with all that going on, if you had a serious heart condition, it might cause you some trouble.  It was either the catalyst that led to my wife’s final days or the match that lit the fuse.

And since they found polyps about ten years ago, I am on the five-year colonoscopy cycle.  Will my heart still be strong five years from now?

Do not get me wrong, but this was a cautionary tale here.  Others may need this procedure and they need to know what it does to you.  Be prepared to endure the various vagaries of this procedure.  Colonoscopies save lives.  I have had friends who died of colon cancer, and I have outlived them by decades.  But maybe five years from now, I may ask my friend to sit with me for a few hours.  I might hydrate more.  I may nap more.  And I might invest in that little device that tracks your EKG on your phone before the next procedure.

And I may not worry about being so perfect with the preparation.

But even in colonoscopies, God has this.  I can let Him worry about the details.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.