Diarrhoea Day

I had a feeling it was going to be that sort of week given that I was scheduled for a colonoscopy on Thursday afternoon, two days after a presidential election which would almost certainly cement Trump to the throne. I anticipated that by the time I woke, future presidential elections would already have been banned due to the confusion caused by having persons other than Trump on the ballot. Some genius would somehow manage to prove that democracy was a threat to freedom of speech, our right to shoot a gun, and possibly all the little unborn babies. I was assuming Trump would win in hope of avoiding the level of despair I experienced first time around when no-one thought he stood a chance in hell. I was assuming Trump would win because it's 2020. I also assumed my colonoscopy would reveal the presence of cancer, because it's 2020, so why wouldn't it?

Shooty the Drug Dealer was back out of the loony bin. Our neighbour across the way had discovered him in his yard at three in the morning.

'Is there some particular reason why I find you in my yard at three in the morning?' our neighbour asked, not unreasonably.

'I saw a man in your yard and I thought he was going to burgle your house,' Shooty explained helpfully. 'I chased him off for you!'

'If I find you in my yard at three in the morning ever again, I will shoot you with my gun,' our neighbour told him, because it wasn't even the first time Shooty had been discovered in his yard at three in the morning.

Shooty was hurt, explaining that - contrary to all of the evidence - he had our neighbour's back and that he considered our neighbour to be not only his bro but also possibly his dawg, or something. Some of this we heard directly from the neighbour, and some from Shooty's mother who phoned to explain that she didn't know why the aforementioned neighbour was being mean to her boy and threatening to shoot him, and it was worrying because now a couple of Shooty's other dawgs were planning to get the neighbour for being so mean to their trespass prone bro.

'Just another day in paradise,' observed Donna, who lives next door to us. Squidward the fantasist who lives on the other side - the man who knows doctors and dentists and clearly believes the rest of us regard him as something classy to which we might aspire - claims that Shooty left a bag of drugs in his garden. Squidward found the bag of drugs - cocaine and acid, he believes, because those are the sort of drugs that druggers like to take when they want to get high.

Shooty was presumably walking along our street with his bag of drugs, which probably had bag of drugs written on it, when he noticed Squidward's garden.

'Yoink!' I'm sure he exclaimed, one finger aloft so as to illustrate that he'd just had a completely brilliant idea. 'That looks like smashing place for me to take some drugs!'

Unfortunately he took so many drugs in Squidward's garden that he must have got unusually high and forgetfully left his bag of drugs behind when it was time to go home for tea - most likely a mound of mashed potato with sausages sticking out.

Rather than call the cops, as he'd once done when his other neighbour's dog was barking - and for pretty much every other fucking thing ever, come to think of it - Squidward instead popped the bag of drugs into yet another neighbour's wheelie bin, making it difficult for the rest of us to verify his frankly fucking ridiculous story. By the time we checked said wheelie bin, some druggers must have found the bag of drugs and smoked the contents because it was no longer there. It was all very mysterious.

On the Saturday before both the election and my colonoscopy, we can hear Shooty literally howling at the moon in the street outside, just like in the films.

The clocks go back on the Sunday, and I start to get those weird visual migraines, one of them at some point every day when I've only had two or three in my entire life.

I have my colonoscopy on Thursday, but more than anything I'm dreading having to fast the day before, and the stuff they'll expect me to drink. They've said it will be sent to my local pharmacy but with just two days to go, they seem to be leaving it a little late. I give the doctor a call. Someone with an accent I have trouble understanding explains that they've already notified me and that the medication went out a week ago. Some pharmacies only keep prescription medicine for three days if no-one turns up to collect, so mine may already have been returned. I ask by what means I have been notified and he reads out a phone number which isn't mine.

'That's great,' I say. 'I guess I'd better go and see if they still have it. If not, I guess I'll speak to you in a bit when I call to cancel my appointment. Many thanks.'

They have my prescription and there's $85 to pay. If we didn't have medical insurance, it would cost $150, which strikes me as expensive when I'm fairly sure I could get the same job done with milk of magnesia. Still, it's better than putting up with all that horrible socialism, right shitheads?

I have a bowl of French onion soup on Tuesday morning, and nothing after that. I take the bowel preparation drink at four in the afternoon, a 6oz bottle diluted with 10oz of water, then another 32oz of water to wash it down. It's pretty much the most disgusting thing I've ever had in my mouth and it cost $85. It's too sweet, sort of salty, and tastes like it should be purple in colour, except it's clear. More than anything it resembles Dr. Pepper which is the worst flavour in the world, something akin to cheap perfume crossed with dental mouthwash and referring to nothing found in nature; and fucking Trump seems to be doing all right so far. At least it's not the landslide defeat promised by all those Democrat party adverts asking for money on facebook.

I fucking loathe the medical-industrial complex industry, I write in my diary that evening. Felt like killing myself most of today.

The purpose of the $85 bowel preparation drink is to give me such powerful shits as to leave me completely empty by the time they get around to poking their Kodak Instamatic up my arse on a spring. By Thursday, I'm so weak that I have to draw a chair up to the kitchen sink and sit as I wash the dishes.

I examine the packaging of the bowel preparation drink and am able to confirm my worst fear, that the flavour is something added presumably so as to make it more yummy, at least in the imagination of someone who thinks Dr. Pepper counts as a flavour and who almost certainly voted for Trump.

Speaking of which, they still haven't finished counting the votes. Biden seems to be in the lead, but who knows. It's still 2020 after all.

We drive to the Stone Oaks medical centre. I enter an empty waiting room - no receptionist. A post-it note stuck to the window of the reception desk suggests I should ask for such and such an extension number when I call to let them know I've arrived. I don't know why they would assume I know what their fucking phone number is.

I bang on the locked door leading to the surgery and yell, 'shop!'

Eventually someone comes, but only because they expected me to be here at this time, not because I've successfully drawn their attention by pounding on the door and yelling.

I change into a gown and lay on a gurney for about ninety minutes with a saline drip feeding into one arm. I've had a headache all morning but haven't been able to take anything for it because the period of fasting applies to ibuprofen as well as to sausages and pies. I listen to the nurses and orderlies talking about country music.

'I loves me some country,' says one, young with a beard. 'I listen to it all day long but, you know, I never realised she had that many songs. I figured she was mainly just someone from the movies.'

'She had a lot of hit songs for sure.'

'Was that like - when was that?'

'Well, the sixties and the seventies mainly.'

'So was that her main thing, what she was known for?'

'Yeah, that's what she's known for more than her movies.'

'Well, there you go.'

I realise they're talking about Dolly Parton.

Eventually I'm wheeled into surgery. I notice Led Zeppelin on the radio, which strikes me as unusual, and the next thing is I'm back out on the ward, feeling wonderful and aglow with the heroin or whatever it was they used to sedate me. It's all over. The doctor shows me a series of snaps taken inside my own bumhole, which doesn't seem to contain anything I need to be worried about.

Also, my headache has gone.

That evening we eat at Good Time Charlie's, and it's the greatest meal I've ever eaten; Joe Biden seems to be president, so far as anyone is able to tell; and even Maisie, our bunny rabbit seems better, although we didn't even realise there was anything wrong. She had one regular ear, and one which flopped down as with lop-eared rabbits. We assumed this peculiar asymmetry was due to mixed parentage, but today she has both ears held proudly aloft for the first time. It feels as though we've turned a corner.