Full Disclosure

As humans we tend to not like to be direct.

We don’t want to tell anybody any kind of bad news and prefer to give them kind of a milder description of what we are thinking. This is where the line “You’ll feel some discomfort” comes from. When I do that it’s because I usually figure that they’ll find out soon enough what the real deal is.

This happened to me earlier this week when a really cute radiology tech told me what I should be looking out for after my barium esophageal study.

“You may notice your poop looking a little lighter”

Is that it? There’s sort of a lie of omission hidden in there. I slammed back a shot of something like pop rocks, that lit my gut up. Followed by a milkshake thick horrible barium mixture. Then a thinner one. Then a pill. Seems like a lot to only have weird dook.

If they were to lay a little full disclosure on me it would’ve sounded more like this:

Now don’t dawdle going home because in about an hour your body is going to clear the decks in your colon to deal with the amount of radioactive goo we made you swallow.

What’s going to happen is your toilet is going to turn into a Superfund site.

Then, for the rest of the day, you’re going to enjoy gas belching out of your stomach, and knotting up your intestines before the second wave hits. That wave will have the barium coming out of your ass in very much the condition that it went down your throat, only burning and more explosive.

But tomorrow, 24 hours later, you’ll probably be okay.

But silly me, I gone through a much smaller test, ingesting far less, at far weaker dosage and seemed fine. So, figuring I was over it, on the bike I went to my meeting at night.

On the way home, it felt like somebody was stabbing me in the guts. I thought for sure I wasn’t gonna make it. It’s not a lot of fun piloting a big powerful bike thinking you can shit yourself any minute.

But I got back safe enough and spent the next two hours with the gurgling and the purging.

Wow, that sucked.

Hope it was worth it. Hope the good Doctor sizes it up and has some words of wisdom for me.

But now I know.