Calling All Colons
I wrote a story about Tania’s first colonoscopy, but this post is really about my colonoscopy fart video, so if you want to skip the story and go straight to the farts at the end I totally understand.
For FOD’s End-Of-Year Post (it’s not a thing), I thought I’d devote it to just that: ENDS—rear ends, to be precise.
For us this has been a very shitty year. First, Tania’s mother died, then Tania almost died and ended up in the hospital for 10 days, then our dachshund Waffle died, then our friend Sharan’s mother, Connie Crackers The Magnificent, died. Suck after suck after suck. And that’s just the major shitty shit that we experienced. On top of all that shit, there’s the great torrents of diarrhea those asshole idiots in Washington are spewing out that are lending the air over, not just our beautiful country, but the entire earth, an especially assy aroma. When does this shit end?
As if that wasn’t enough, Tania scheduled her first colonoscopy in December—2025 was, after all, the year of The Snake in the Chinese zodiac, and “snake” is the common name of a tool used to clean plumbing pipes.
If you’ve ever had the procedure, you know how shitty it is. Ultimately, it’s good for you, you should get one, but it sucks. It sucks a lot. My first colonoscopy was very dramatic because it occurred at the beginning of the Covid lockdown. I scheduled this horrible appointment before Covid, then Covid happened, and that changed everything. As you may remember.
The morning of my colonoscopy appointment, I got a call from the hospital. The nurse said, “Your Covid results haven’t arrived, so we can’t accept you this morning.”
“LIKE FUN YOU WON’T ACCEPT ME,” I screamed. “We are having a colonoscopy this morning! You are going to jam a camera up my ass and look for polyps, and laser burn them out, whether you like it or not!” I yelled. It was like switch-stance rape. “Oh, nuh-uh, bitch, YOU are going to buttfuck ME right now!”
I was adamant about having a colonoscopy because there was no way I was going to go through the 24-hour colonoscopy preparation endurance challenge ever again. Ever. Basically, you have to clear your bowels out before they go poking around up in there. Makes sense, right? Clean the shit out of your shit tubes before you invite someone into your shit tubes. Like: make your bed before you have guests over. Tidy up a little. But (butt?) in colonoscopy terms that means: enemas. Liquid laxatives. You are required to flush your Hershey Highway. Ugh, it is pure torture. The night before the procedure you have to drink 10,000 gallons of enema water and then sit on the toilet and shit your brains out for the entire night.
“Enema water” is my lame attempt at describing a brew that defies description. Imagine taking a large pile of Bandaids, guaze, tourniquets, anything bloody and gross one would find in a hospital garbage can, then form that pile of grossness into the shape of a towel, and then wring it out over a bucket. Now add a healthy dash of public beach bathroom urine. Then take a shit in the bucket. Now: drink that bucket. For two hours. Constantly. And then when you’re done with that bucket of scab juice, here’s another bucket of scab juice that smells like a public bathroom at the beach. DRINK IT, YOU PUSSY! And we’re talking Home Depot-size buckets full of this shit. It’s gnarly.
Tania was so offended by the buckets of scab juice that she invoked the fantasy flavor factories that exist off the NJ Turpike: “If they can make cough medicine taste like cherries, why can’t they do anything to this shit? [GACK!]” Tania was strongly affected by the taste of the scab juice and she was very mad at it. It is gack-inducing. And, of course, it makes you gack out the other end, too. After you’ve completed the torture of self-water-boarding, your reward is sitting on the toilet and pissing out of your rear end (ends!) til well into the wee hours of the morning.
I did not endure this torture for naught. (The word naught is used not often enough, it’s not.) “The fuck we aren’t having a colonoscopy this morning,” I said to the nurse. I’m usually very polite, but that 10,000 gallons of enema water makes weird shit come out of you. Out of every orifice. I’m sorry for being rude to the nurse lady on the phone, but it makes you kinda cranky.
We ended up doing a Covid test in the parking garage. I passed. Woo. And was allowed into the hospital to have my asshole raped. They raped my nose in the parking garage, then they raped my ass in the hospital. Very gentlemanly of them.
They put you under for the ass rape. I love being put under. I call it: The Darkness. I don’t understand why anyone is scared of this. Because The Darkness is NOTHINGNESS.
No longer exist.
No be.
Nothing.
Death.
What could be better?
The anesthesiologist jams a needle in my arm, they start counting, I usually don’t even make it to three, and then I’m OUT. I no longer AM. I don’t exist anymore. It is fucking amazing.
Unfortunately, my Darkness was disturbed when I awoke in the middle of my colonoscopy. But “awoke” is too strong of a word. They use the word “twilight” to describe the level of Darkness they provide for this routine procedure (it is so routine, yet very dramatic for the individual experiencing it), so I was only kinda sorta awake. I attained a low level of consciousness for what was in reality probably a matter of seconds, but to me felt like a much longer duration.
I awoke, in a cloud, right in the middle of the procedure when the doctor was way up my butt with the camera and the laser gun. There were nurses in the room so they were also way up my butt. I could see the inside of my butt on the TV monitor next to the bed. “Oh, that’s me on the inside!” I remember thinking as I saw the monitor. I don’t remember exactly what my Up-The-Butt Team were talking about, it was rather mundane, like movies, or vacations, or something, but they were laughing and having a good time while they were aggressively probing my anus. I remember wanting to join the conversation, yet I was conscious enough to recognize that it would be sort of weird if I, a man lying on an operating table with a camera and a laser gun up his butt, just interjected in the middle of their conversation, like, “HAHAHA! YEAHHHH! TOTALLY! I know, seriously, right?” So I gently laughed along waiting for an opportunity to say something, but before I had even finished any of those thoughts, I passed out again. Back to The Darkness. Ahhh.
Then I really awoke (sorta). The second I opened my eyes they made me put on my clothes, they forced me into a wheelchair, pushed me outside into the hot sun, and crammed me into the front seat of a car. “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” they said. Or maybe it was, “Bite it, you scum!” I don’t remember. Fortunately, the car was our car, Tania was in the driver seat, and she took me home. “Is this reality?” I asked. I didn’t say that, but I was one of those people: a stupid, drooling, foggy mess, not able to operate heavy machinery, a vehicle, or even light machinery. I much preferred The Darkness, where there was no machinery, light, heavy, or otherwise, but, okay, I can work with this. I guess. Life. That’s what we’re doing here? Fine.
Tania had never been put under before. She had had little hospital experience before this year—as it should be for anyone who is smart enough to not step on a skateboard. So she was naturally very nervous about being put under. It’s a frightening prospect.
“Being under was THE BEST,” Tania texted when she awoke from her colonoscopy. “I would like to schedule multiple cosmetic surgeries just for the sleep.”
Tania texted. She could operate machinery. Tania also walked out of the hospital on her own volition. I had to be delivered to my caretaker in a wheelchair because I was such a pile of shit. Tania just walked out all, “What’s up?” I even went to open the car door for my little invalid and she was like, “What are you doing?” When we got home, she sat down at her desk and went to work. We also went out to dinner that night. A celebratory colonoscopy survival dinner. (We went to Bar Avoja which is sort of inside the colon of Mother Wolf—a horrible description of a fabulous destination, but we’re in the middle of a colonoscopy article and Bar Avoja is hidden deep inside another restaurant, so I feel the colon reference is appropriate.)
When I got home, I went to bed. And that’s when the farting began. Epic flatulence. It is a well-known after effect of a colonoscopy. They fill your butt up with air so they can look around in there and, when they’re done, that air has to go somewhere. For most people, including me, it comes right back out from whence it came, the anus. Farts. I was such a pile of shit that I could barely record the amount of gas thundering out of my buttocks, but I managed to operate a camera and I got a few of them on film (film?). The resulting video is below. Pencil and Waffle’s reactions to my anal symphony are the same reactions I was having: da fuck is going on back there? That video never gets old to me. My butt has never put on such a performance before or since. It was ASStounding.
Tania, on the other hand, did not fart. Not even a toot. (She reported that there was in fact one toot, but I didn’t hear it so I don’t believe her.) Which sucks. Because the Flatulent Fundament Philharmonic performance at the end of a colonoscopy almost makes the preparatory torture worth it. I had cameras, lights, tripods, and all kinds of shit set up to record Tania’s epic anal performance—no one has ever recorded Tania farting in Nature, it’s rumored she has never farted EVER, to get a Tania fart on camera would be more monumental than capturing Great White Sharks mating—but it was all for naught (!). She just went back to work like everything was totally normal and no one had jammed a camera and a laser gun up her ass an hour before. “What time are we going to Bar Avejo?” she asked.
Tania’s colonoscopy report was positive. No cancer. So that’s one good thing that happened in 2025. But no farts. There will be no documentary. Very disappointing.
Life is kind of like a fart, isn’t it? They’re both assembled inside a human body from fluids and goop, they both come screaming out of an orifice, then they both float around for a while making a big stink about everything, until we begin to break apart and finally dissipate completely, and then we, and our farts, no longer exist—The Darkness. The end.
Happy New Year. Pfft.