the first absolutely terribly step of this process...PREP.

Alright so..depending on who is reading this (friends/family of mine interested in my story or other UC/IBD sufferers) you may or may not have had to prepare for a colonoscopy in your lifetime.

If you haven't, damn you're lucky.

I talked before about how terrible prep for this is, and how I really struggled with it when I was first sick and they were trying to diagnose me. This time I used a method I had never used before. My surgery was Monday, and I had to stop eating at midnight on Saturday, so no foods on Sunday at all. I could have liquids (popcicles and jello, but that doesn't count...SO not real.) At any rate...

I took some antibiotics the day before surgery, and then this little pill that came along with my bowel prep kit. It acted as a minor laxative to sort of ease me into the process. You're supposed to take the pill at like...4 or something (I don't have the paper near me...) and then the next step is waiting for a bowel movement which could happen as soon as 30 minutes or as long as 4 hours after taking the pill. After you have your first bowel movement you have to start drinking the liquid that will make the rest of your evening, and well into the next day, a living hell.

I prepped for my surgery at my sister and brother in law's apartment in Indy. That way we would already be in town, not 10 minutes from the hospital where my procedure was going to take place, rather than an hour or so away. We watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban while we waited for my little pill to take effect. I don't know why I remember that...

I believe it's something like...64 ounces of liquid that you have to drink, total. You drink one 8 ounce glass every 10 minutes. The liquid is flavored, in an attempt to make it less horrible, but it doesn't work. (I seriously just gagged thinking back to it what it was like..) I think I picked orange flavor...or something. But you really don't taste the flavor much. The mixture is very salty...:shudders: I drank the first glass down just fine. Yeah, it was disgusting and extremely unpleasant, but I chugged that drink like a trooper and started timing 10 minutes until I had to chug the next one. I got the next one down a little less easy than the first (it's harder to do it once you KNOW how unpleasant it is...not like I expected it to be tasty, but before you know how awful it really is, you can delude yourself into thinking that it might not be that bad...) and then I started feeling like SHIT.

Only 6 more glasses to go....

You don't leave the bathroom during processes like this. You just don't. It's not worth it, because even if you do go somewhere else, you aren't going to be staying there for very long...if you catch my drift...

It just got harder and harder. Probably by the 4th glass, I couldn't bring myself to just chug it down all at once anymore. It was just so terrible. I could probably get it down in two chugs, and then soon after that, I couldn't even do it that well. It was so awful.

I wish I could accurately describe the feeling that this medicine started giving me...I would swallow just one little gulp of it and my stomach would automatically start twisting and turning...it felt like it was literally flipping over in my abdomen and twisting its self into knots. It was so difficult to get that medicine down. I was maybe only half way done when my stomach started undulating with every tiny sip of the medicine that I swallowed. My body wanted that shit out. It wanted me to puke. But all I kept thinking was that if I threw up, then I wasn't going to be able to have my surgery done, and I was going to have to go through all of this again another day, and I knew I couldn't do that. So I would swallow my medicine and immediately clasp my hand over my mouth to keep everything in. You know that thing your mouth does when you're about to puke? Where you just salivate like crazy, and you just KNOW that your body wants you to vomit? That was happening constantly. I just kept swallowing and trying to think of ANYTHING else to get my mind off of how much I just wanted to throw up.

I still had so much left to drink. It was becoming so hard to keep going....I had already given up trying to drink the solution exactly 10 minutes apart like I was supposed to. I knew if I had kept that up, I would have been throwing up uncontrollably...so I sacrificed doing the prep in a timely fashion, to try and be able to do it without throwing the medicine right back up again.

The only problem with this is that I was supposed to stop consuming anything after 11pm...even water, and my medicine. 11 just kept getting closer and closer...

I was down to my last 2 glasses. I got one of them down and threw it right back up. I couldn't prevent it. I started bawling my eyes out. I was just convinced that they weren't going to be able to do my surgery because I didn't complete my prep...One glass left...I drank about half of it and just couldn't bring myself to finish those last 4 ounces. I know it seems stupid that after drinking 60 ounces I couldn't bring myself to chug a few more, but like I said, if you've never done a prep like this before, you don't understand just how awful it is. My body ached from not moving from the bathroom for hours upon hours...I was crying, worrying about my procedure the next day and whether or not it would even be able to happen...I wanted to throw up and get all the terrible medicine out of my system more than anything in the world...

Then my time ran out. My sister came in and measured how much medicine I hadn't finished, it was just under 4 ounces. She said "you're done..now rest" I cried to her and my mom because I was so worried that if I got to the hospital and told them I couldn't finish my prep that they were going to tell me they couldn't do the surgery...I cried because I hurt...I cried because I was terrified even if it turned out that they could do the surgery...I was just so sick and so scared...

They made me feel a little bit better by reminding me that they don't adjust the dosage of preps like this for your size. So what I mean is that a fully grown man that could weigh 300 lbs would have to drink the same amount of this liquid as me...a 21-year-old girl that probably weighed about 97 lbs at the time this was taking place.

I slept in the bathroom that night. That's just what you have to do when you prep like this. You don't have any other choice. It was a long time before I even felt comfortable getting up off the toilet, it's that bad of a situation. But when I finally did, Sandy had gotten me some blankets and a pillow and I curled up in the corner of the bathroom. I still had to get up every little while, and I got no real rest. I just laid on the hard floor listening to my ipod and trying to calm myself down. I was terrified of so many things that could go wrong...

Morning came too soon...there was a definite air about the house. Everyone was on edge..everyone was worried. I was still going to the bathroom, which was terrifying to me. I was just all the more convinced that they were going to tell me that they couldn't do the surgery because of something that I did wrong...

They told me to be at the hospital at 5:30...so we hopped into the car and made our way there...