Well, here I am, having survived The Awful Procedure You Have to Get When You're 50.

I'm not going to go into the kind of excruciating detail that some of the other sites over which I pored looking for first-hand accounts do, but since I, being the Healthiest Fat Person Alive, am a complete wuss about all things medical, maybe I can put someone else's mind at ease.

The worst part of this whole mess for me is the liquid diet you have to be on for an entire day. This is basically limited to coffee or tea without milk (sugar and honey are OK), clear fruit juices, Sprite/7-up, ginger ale, clear broth, ice pops in colors other than red or purple, and yellow or green Jello. That's it.

At 7 AM yesterday, I had a nice cup of Twining's Earl Grey. At 8, I had some yello-Jello, feeling very virtuous and thinking "This isn't going to be so bad.

By 10 AM I was thinking about how the Maggie 2000 Cat-Bot would taste with fava beans and a nice chianti. More Jello.

At noon, I had a can of chicken broth, which actually in my already-delirious state tasted like something resembling real food. I washed this down with a Trader Joe's Lime Juice pop, and felt like I'd had lunch. Then I downed the 4 bisacodyl tablets that come with the whimsically-named Half-Lytely prep kit, mixed the 2-liter bottle of Colon-Blow "with orange flavor pack"....and waited.

At 3 PM I had more Jello and started counting hours till I'd be done with this so I could have real food, and started cursing that we could have gone to see Clerks II after all.

At 5 PM the pills hit, and after spending about 20 minutes curled up in a fetal position on the floor, I felt well enough to face the Big Plastic Bottle in the fridge.

Orange flavor my ass. It tastes like slightly oily, salty, soapy water with a slight odor (and no flavor) of Tang -- a substance which, fittingly, I usually mix into a paste and put on the walls of the tub to try to cut through the stubborn lime deposits. You have to drink 8 oz. of this stuff every 10-15 minutes till it's gone.

The first one goes down OK, the second one not so OK, and by the third one the gag reflex is kicking in. So I resorted to the gastric miracle drug, ginger ale: six gulps of Half-Lytely for man, one small sip of ginger ale for mankind. If you ever have to drink this stuff, the hell with what they say -- do it with a ginger ale chaser. It helps a lot.

By 7:30 PM I'm done with the whole thing. And now we'll fade to black except for one observation: Don't be afraid of what comes next. The cramping from the bisacodyl pills is the worst part of it, and that's done in about 1/2 hour at most. The rest of it isn't fun, but it's not terrible. It's a variation on what you do every day anyway, and it's a chance for you to get caught up on all those magazines you haven't had time to read. By the time you can go about an hour between bathroom trips, it's safe to go to bed. You'll feel gutted like a fish, but you'll be clean and ready.

I had my procedure done at an outpatient surgical center, the same one at which I'd had another procedure done last month. If you are a wuss like me, this is preferable to a doctor's office procedure, because it's like a mini-hospital. Very professional, very efficient. The sedation is administered by an M.D. anesthesiologist, which helps to ameliorate the wuss-terror that YOU will be the one who won't wake up....ever...and that this is why they put the name bracelet on you and you wonder why they don't just toe-tag you now.

At this place, the anesthesiologist is a very pleasant, overweight woman who when I ask what I had last time and is it the same, she says she gave me a little Propofol, a little Versed, a little this, a little that, looks at me, grins slyly, and says "I like to mix it up." Of course, since she was the anesthesiologist last time and says it's the same mix as I had last month, my blood pressure finally drops to something approaching normal levels.

The most painful thing is the IV stick, which this time I manage to bear without sniffing an alcohol pad to prevent passing out, and soon after they wheel me into the OR, where LOUD music is playing. If I recall correctly, it was something by Huey Lewis and the News, which makes me hope that the handsome-but-stern Middle Eastern (Iranian?) physician to whom the urologist had referred me, who makes his living shoving 400 feet of tubing up people's asses, has better scoping skills than he has taste in music. It seems that unlike most physicians, who enjoy hearing themselves talk while they work, Dr. F. likes to listen to music. I suppose it could be worse; he could be a fan of the vocal stylings of Celine Dion. But Huey Lewis? I start thinking about the scene in American Psycho where Christian Bale explains the genius of Huey Lewis to Jared Leto right before turning him into hamburger. I abandon all hope, decide to meet my fate, and ask the nurse when the bar and buffet open and where the dance floor is. The anesthesiologist, whom I shall forever more think of as Dr. Mix-a-Lot, decides she's had quite enough of this particular wiseass broad, thank you very much, and starts administering the sedation. I say "Ooh! Woozy!" -- and the next thing I know I'm waking up.

This time I was more aware of falling into sleep, and more aware of a gradual waking than last time, which was more like ceasing to exist and then existing again. But everything was fine, there was one small polyp which was removed and sent for biopsy just in case -- which means I have to do this again in three years instead of 10.

I was out of there by 9:50 AM.

I have a greeting card that I'm saving for the next one of my friends to hit a "milestone birthday." It has a photo from the 1950's of an old man with a pipe talking to a rapt young boy, and a dialogue balloon that reads, "...and that, Jimmy, is the tale of my very first colonoscopy." On the inside it reads, "Welcome to the gross personal story years." I guess I've reached those years.

I hope this wasn't too graphic for you folks. But I have been blessed with good health my entire life, and when you have this blessing, you get spoiled, and are ill-equipped for dealing with the challenges of advancing years. I never had children, I've never been a patient in a hospital, and the prospect of this whole colonoscopy thing was terrifying, no matter how many people said it was a piece of cake. I'd been putting it off for a year, but when I had to have this other thing, it made sense to proceed with it at the same facility.

Everything you've heard is true. The prep is probably the worst part for most people, though I'd say that the ravenous hunger and all that damn Jello is the worst part. And of the prep, drinking 2 liters of slop is the worst part, though thanks to the Chinese, the wonder drug ginger helps that along too. And if you're squeamish about people putting things into places that are, for you, usually points of egress rather than entrance, there's no need to be, because you're out cold when they do that too.

It's highly unlikely that the polyp I had removed is anything other than just a polyp. But whether it is something or not, the fact remains that it was removed before it could turn into something that could have me shitting into a bag for an indeterminate number of years, or worse, dying a painful, premature death before I can have a chance to finish refacing the kitchen cabinets or complete the novels that have been living in my brain for 7 years or pay off the house.

So if you are over 50 and haven't done this yet, don't wait. And if you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to e-mail me. If a wussy drama queen like me can do it, so can you.