Daily Note: January 12, 2008

Alright dudes. I’m back from Washington DC, but don’t have much to report. I forgot my camera so my Mom took pictures – primarily ones of me standing in front of every monument ever built giving my half sincere, half 14-year-old-“Moooom, hurry up and take the picture”-smile. The big highlight for me was probably walking down Pennsylvania Ave and watching them erect all the grand stands and stages for inauguration. Oh and also, my Mom and I rented Tropic Thunder and watched it in our hotel room together one night. The lowlight was probably when I had to have both my ears amputated from frostbite. Just kidding. But seriously, it was SO COLD and SO WINDY.

On an unrelated note, please send positive thoughts my Grandmother’s way as she starts chemo this week. Please also send hopeful thoughts to everyone else in my family who are having to schedule and undergo preventative colonoscopies as it is now coming out of the woodwork that just about everyone who bears my Mother’s maiden name died of colon cancer. You might be wondering what the biggest predictor of colon cancer is. The answer: genetics. Awesome. Thankfully, my brother and I get to delay this super fun procedure for a few more years yet.

A few years ago I had an upper endoscopy, which is when they put you to sleep and cram a tube with a camera in it down your throat to look at your stomach. They do all the “oscopies” in the same wing of my hospital. I still remember waiting in the back room of the hospital for them to call me back for my upper endoscopy. I was sitting in a wide corridor filled with people recuperating from their oscopies behind thin little curtains. I was nervously jiggling my leg and pretending to read a magazine when I heard the following exchange from behind a gauzy curtain:

Nurse: Mr. Paterson? Can you hear me?
Mr. Paterson: (indiscernible groan)
Nurse: Mr. Paterson, I’d like you to roll over on your side for me, can you do that?
(Shifting noise)
Nurse: Great, now I need you to pass some gas for me.
(Horrible gaseous noise that went on for at least 30 full seconds)
Nurse: That was a good job Mr. Paterson, can you do it again?
Mr. Paterson: mmmm-okaaaay (more horrible farting noises)

I was HORRIFIED. Poor Mr. Paterson is probably a husband and a father with a successful career and here he was heavily sedated and being made to fart within hearing range of MANY people. Couldn’t they at least give the poor man a private room in which to pass gas? Don’t think I won’t be discussing this with my doctor before I have MY colonoscopy.