Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(58)

When I think of it, he’s actually not a bad candidate for two hundred. Here he is, eighty-nine years old, and he’s never once spent a night in the hospital. Four times a week he attends a spinning class at the Y, this in addition to a great deal of walking and dragging things around. His memory is excellent. He does all his own shopping and cooking and has never once called any of us by the wrong name. The secret, he tells me, is to eat seven gin-soaked raisins a day.

“Blond or dark?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Could I possibly cut out the gin part? Marinate them in, I don’t know, coffee or something.”

“Do you want to live or don’t you?” he asked.

When I told my father about Dan’s prophecy, he said, “Aw, baloney. A twenty-year-old kid in Holland, what does he know?”

“He learned it in school.”

“No, he didn’t,” my father said. “The guy was just pulling your leg.” He had a similar opinion of the plastic bags hanging in Francine’s doorway. “It’s just a load of BS.”

“As opposed to seven gin-soaked raisins keeping you alive until you’re eighty-nine?”

“Hey,” he said, “those raisins work!”

If not them, something was doing the trick. He harassed me with the energy of a man half his age until finally, six months after our trip to Amsterdam, I cracked. I was in the United States at the time, in the midst of a thirty-day, thirty-city tour. Once it was over, I planned on visiting my family, and, figuring I’d just be sitting around anyway, I called a North Carolina endoscopy center and made an appointment. The place I chose was not in Raleigh—my father would have insisted on watching—but in Winston-Salem, where Lisa lives.

Booking the procedure two weeks in advance left me plenty of time to collect stories, both good and bad. The part maligned by just about everyone was the preparation. In order for your colon to be properly studied, it has to be empty. To achieve this, you are prescribed a horrific combination of laxatives and stool softeners that essentially chains you to the toilet for a period of twelve to eighteen hours. Some of the people I spoke with had remained conscious during their colonoscopies and had even joined their doctors in watching the footage live on the monitor. These tended to be the same types who did their own taxes and read Consumer Reports before buying a dehumidifier or toaster oven. They were, in effect, the types I am not.

As long as somebody knocked me out, I felt that I’d be okay. Then I met a woman who took my fragile peace of mind and shattered it. “The camera up the bottom part was not so bad,” she reported. “I was out cold while all that happened, but then I was wheeled into what was called ‘the farting room’ and told I couldn’t leave until I had passed enough gas to satisfy them.”

“No!” I said.

“They inflate your colon with air, and you absolutely have to get it out before going home,” she told me. “I had a nurse literally pressing on my stomach like she was kneading dough.”

“And you had to do that…in front of people?”

She closed her eyes and nodded.

“I can’t,” I told her.

“But you’ll have to!”

“No, seriously. I can’t.”





“I didn’t have a farting room,” Lisa said when I repeated the woman’s story. “At least it wasn’t written on the door. And you might think it’s crazy, but I loved my colonoscopy.” Without my sister’s enthusiasm I might have canceled my appointment. As it was, she could not have been more helpful or encouraging. The day before my procedure, she gave me my laxatives and poured my first glass of Gatorade mixed with stool softener. I drank the required thirty-two ounces, I suffered the effects, and the next morning I forced down another bottle. I’d thought that going without solid food for a total of twenty-four hours would leave me peckish and cranky, but I felt no hungrier than usual when, at the appointed time, we headed to the endoscopy center.

At the front desk I checked in and was told that for the rest of the day I would not be able to write checks or make any legal decisions. “Is that okay?” asked the receptionist. She was cheerful and sweet-smelling, and as I picked up her pen to sign my release forms, I noticed the paw prints tattooed on her chest. It looked like she’d been stepped on, or perhaps hugged, by a bobcat with muddy feet.

“Those are darling,” Lisa said, and the woman, whose name was Vette, thanked her. Behind us in the waiting room were a half dozen people. All were a good deal older than me, and most were watching television. It wasn’t tuned to the news but rather to a loop of brief medical infomercials. “Could you be suffering from an overactive bladder?” the narrator of one of them wondered. Next we were asked to consider irritable bowel syndrome.

“Oh no,” Lisa whispered, wincing at the TV. I thought I’d get to sit with her for a while, and maybe learn something new about incontinence, but moments after signing my last form I was led into the back of the building and into the room where my procedure would take place. In its center was a tall hospital bed, and running along one wall was a high shelf loaded with supplies. There might have been a dozen things on it, but what caught my eyes and precluded them from advancing was the K-Y Jelly, which was stored in a tub the size of a bongo drum.