March is colon cancer awareness month

Soooooo in light of that, I will take you on the colonoscopy journey.  Now I am a pretty open person, I will walk up to a stranger in a store and start chatting, hoping to find some common ground.  I will tell you how I feel.  When I go through the starbucks drive thru, I always want to be honest when they ask me how I feel, I want to tell her I have a migraine and I'm not doing well, but there are people waiting behind me, so I lie.

So here it is:

Now I thought it was going to be a really horrible day, I have been dreading this day for a month.  But I received a wonderful e-mail from Kayce , a sweet lady featured in Country Living.  I wrote about her a few posts back. I commented on her blog about how I would love to hear the boring details of how she started out.  She actually wrote me back and gave me her number and said to call her!

So this day has started out pretty darn good.  By thy way, visit her blog and you can link to her online clothing store.  Beautiful dresses!  I'm adding a dress to my wish list, yet another thing to save up for with Lollibag sales!

Back to reality here, I have talked about my mom, her death was a huge life change for me.  It haunts me and being motherless has changed me.  She died of colon cancer.  Which is the most preventable cancer there is!  Your Dr. will tell you, you don't need a colonoscopy till your 50.  My mom died at age 50 from colon cancer.  If you have a close relative that has had it, they say to come in at 40.  That is better, but I have a friend who has stage 4 colon cancer and he is my age, 38.

So....... THE PREP

In the above picture you see what I can have today.  I must be on a liquid diet, I can have chicken broth, yellow or green jello, 7-up, gatorade (which I hate), ice tea , and coffee.  I gotta tell ya my tummy has been growling since 7:30am....Lord help me.

At Noon I must take 2 laxative tablets.  At 2pm, I must mix the ENTIRE bottle of Miralax in a 64oz. bottle of gatorade, my bottle is 128 oz, but that is all target had.

Now I have to drink half the gatorade/miralax mixture slowly over 1-2 hours.  Drink 2 cups of water after to optimize the prep.

At 5pm if I have not had several trips to the bathroom, drink a bottle of magnesium citrate (another laxative), slowly over 1 hour followed by a glass of water.  I can skip this step if I have ran to the bathroom quite a few times already.

Now tomorrow at 4am I must get up and take two more laxative tablets and drink the other 34oz of gatorade/miralax mixture.  They say expect to have only 12 -15 trips to the bathroom throughout entire process including earling morning hours.

That is NEVER how it happens for me!  I take all this stuff and don't start running to the bathroom till maybe 10 pm, then I am up all night for FAR more than 12-15 times, by that point I am so sick to my stomache, I end up skipping the 4am pills and drink, cuz I would just throw it up anyway.  and I am still "running" to the bathroom till we leave for the appointment.  Which I have to "run" to the bathroom at the clinic also. 

But somehow it all works out, you get hooked up to an iv, your head hurts so bad from being dehydrated I think.  You walk into the room.  Last time I did this I walked into the room only to be greeted by two young male nurses, who looked to still be in college... GREAT! 

They give you some sleepy medicine and you wake up in recovery and throw up.  Well I do, cuz I get sick from the sleepy medicine.  So there you have it.

I hope I didn't discourage you to much, but if you have a family history of polyps or cancer, go in and get it done,  it could save your life!