The Elephant in the Room by Tommy Tomlinson

Author:Tommy Tomlinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

MAY

Once you turn fifty, two things happen: AARP starts recruiting you harder than Alabama recruits an all-state linebacker, and your doctor tells you to get a colonoscopy. I sign up for the colonoscopy. It can’t be as much of a pain in the ass as the AARP.

To get ready for the colonoscopy, I have to go on a fast and start drinking this stuff called MoviPrep, which tastes like knockoff Gatorade mixed with salt water. I choke down a liter the night before the colonoscopy, and another liter the morning of. It does its awful work. There’s nothing left inside my digestive system but air and regret. By the time we get to the clinic, I haven’t eaten for thirty-three hours. It’s a perfect Starting Over Moment. All the junk in my system has literally been cleaned out. After the colonoscopy I can start filling myself with healthy food, and less of it.

The clinic is running an hour and a half behind. They finally call me back to a little room where I undress and put on one of those fashionable hospital gowns. They hook up an IV and wheel me out on a gurney. We’re in the middle of the hallway when the anesthesiologist stops us. By now, I know that anesthesiologists look at fat guys the way families look at the drunk uncle who shows up at the reunion.

“Mr. Tomlinson,” he says, looking down at me. “How much do you weigh, again?”

“Around four fifty.” Having to say it right in the middle of the nurses and the other patients and everyone.

“Hmm. Let me go talk to the doctor a second.”

They wheel me back to the room. A few minutes later, he returns. He says that because of my size, and the throat surgery twenty-two years ago, there’s a possibility I’ll need a breathing tube. The clinic doesn’t have the equipment. So they can’t do the colonoscopy here. They’ll make a call so I can go straight to the hospital a couple miles away. “You’ll thank me for this later,” the anesthesiologist says. I’m damn sure not thanking him now.

Now everything goes backward. They take the IV out, I get dressed again, they cut off my little plastic bracelet, Alix walks me to the car. I get almost all the way there before I cry. Waves of self-hate rise up like nausea. It’s a colonoscopy clinic. This is what they do. They do thousands a year. And I was too fat for them. Having me there was too big a risk.

It’s that feeling I can never shake, of being in the way, of being too much trouble.

The staff at the hospital is kind. They’re playing classic rock in the room where they do the procedure—the Stones’ “Rock and a Hard Place,” which is not the ideal song to hear before a doctor sends a probe up your butt. But they knock me out and I wake up half an hour later, gassy but feeling fine. They find a couple of small polyps, nothing alarming, and tell me to come back in three years.

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