Lights… camera…. swallow!

My wife had a capsule endoscopy procedure done today. It’s a medical procedure where a camera inside a pill-sized capsule is swallowed to give the doctors a good visualization of the digestive tract. She had to wear a harnessed computer with and octopus of sensor tentacles taped across her upper torso that would receive the images transmitted by the capsule from inner space. She wore this for 8 hours today.

To prep for this, she had to fast… and be flushed out. She had to drink this Pico-Salax shtuff to make way for the camera and the clarity of the photos it would share. I can’t speak for her experience, but in preparation for another slightly more intrusive procedure myself, I had to take this wonderful stuff. Ironically, it tastes like shit. After you drink it, you have to follow it up with Lake Huron. The water flowed through me faster with each glass I would consume. Eventually, the water was not only clear when it came out the other end, it was still cold. Try it sometime… it’s a great party trick. But I digress…

She had been fasting since yesterday morning… having nothing but water, white cranberry juice and lemon flavoured Jello. Having been there before, I figured I had license to do a little playful ribbing, humming “They call it yellow Jello…quite rightly. They call it yellow Jello…” “Oh, honey, don’t be jealous of this sandwich… really, it’s not so good. I cut this home-made bread a little too thick, the peanut butter is creamy, and the jam is sweet. Not very good.”

The poor girl. She suffered it out though, like a trooper. She had to wait four hours after she swallowed the pill to have a glass of water, and another four hours before she could eat. That would make it 36 hours between meals. Eight hours and thirty seconds after she swallowed the pill, she was face and eyes into a plate of homemade macaroni and cheese.

You guessed it, “They call it yellow elbows…. with cheddar. They call it yellow elbows!”