The next thing I knew, I woke up in an emergency room in Lisbon.
Apparently, I had been feeling a bit ill and went to sit down just in front of the garage. But it was too steep, so I pitched forward into the ping-pong table below. I hit my head hard, and when my daughter rushed to pick me up, her arms were quickly covered in red. My son, who happened to be playing ping pong just then, blanched at the sight of the pooling blood. My friends grabbed their heads in despair, wondering how they were going to break the news of my accidental death to my husband.
Of course, I managed to live—thankfully—to tell this tale.
Head trauma, pool of blood, knocked out, rescue teams… the friends whose house we were at didn’t clean anything up until they were sure I had returned home safely, so as not to destroy any evidence of what happened.
So there I was in the emergency room.
I woke up feeling awful and puking in my bed. My daughter and friends were nearby, along with several other people in bad shape, also lying in beds just like me. Despite undergoing a series of blood tests, x-rays, EKGs, and other testing, the medical team decided that I was to remain lying down the entire time due to suffering an intense blow to the head. I had no choice but to rely entirely on others. Even when I had to go to the bathroom, they just rolled me into another room where I was forced to use a bedpan.
My friends took turns staying with me in small groups, but every test involved a long wait. And since I had zero memory of the incident, my daughter had to explain everything all over again every time there was another one.
I felt terrible for inconveniencing everyone and just wanted to get it all over with and go home—but my EKG results weren’t great, and they told me I had to stay. I pleaded with them to let me go through my attitude and the look on my face. Finally, they asked an expert for a second opinion and they released me. The conversation went something like this:
“My head is killing me—can I have some headache medicine?”
“You have a headache from the injury or from drinking too much?”
“From the drinking, I think.”
Man, did I learn my lesson.
I went in for another EKG several weeks later, and thankfully, it was normal. The next step was to get my GI tract checked out, something I’d been concerned about for a while. People told me that the exam prep was awful, so I kept putting it off even though I knew I needed to get it done. Between ongoing stomach cramps and the fact that my father died from stomach cancer, I figured that now was the time to do it.
To begin with, people 50 and over are required to get an EKG along with hemoglobin and other blood testing before the exam. This is apparently due to the anesthesia.
Food restrictions begin three days prior to the exam. You can eat things like low-fat chicken and fish, white rice, eggs, and bread, but have to avoid red meat, fatty fish (like salmon), vegetables, stuffed foods, milk, nuts, beans, and red juices or jellies. I love eating, so I was worried about the food restrictions, but as long as I ate a pretty typical traditional Japanese diet, I didn’t really feel deprived at all—aside from the lack of vegetables.
Then I had to flush everything out—the part everybody dreads. In this case, it was just as bad as people said. I had to buy a powdered laxative called PLENVU at the pharmacy and prepare it in two batches, mixed with 500 ml of water each. I had to drink the first batch in five portions, fifteen minutes apart, then drink at least 500 ml of tea or water.
After several hours, I had to do the same with the second batch (five portions in fifteen-minute intervals), but then I had to drink at least a whole liter of tea or water.
The medicine tasted like a sweet-and-salty Ramune soda. It didn’t taste bad so much as it was just tough to swallow. I kept sipping water just to try to get the taste out of my mouth, so the first 500 ml went down surprisingly easily. If anything, I probably downed more than a liter just by being grossed out.
For the second batch of laxatives, I couldn’t get past the third portion. It was awful. I forced down the fourth and fifth portions, but before I could go poop my guts out in the toilet, I had to lie down for a minute or risk puking everything back up. My entire plumbing system was packed with water, so to relieve myself somewhat, I just shut myself up in the bathroom for a while and did my best to release everything I could.
Four hours before the exam, you have to stop taking in even water. After heading to the clinic, answering the nurse’s questions, and meeting the anesthesiologist and the physician who would do the EGD and colonoscopy, it was easy. Thanks to the anesthesia, everything was all over when the nurse woke me up. My throat stung a little—maybe because of the camera they put down there, but it was nothing compared to the awful prep work. I’m not sure if it was the deep sleep I got thanks to the anesthesia or maybe the leftover drugs making me feel loopy, but I felt incredibly content.
Best of all, my digestive tract was healthy.
