Brace yourself, it's the black snake
MIKE O'Connor has dug into his drawer and pulled out a favourite column from the past.
IT occurred to me, as we stood in a circle clutching our glasses, that no matter how desperately I might try to embrace a contrary view, the evidence was mounting that I was no longer in what could be described as the first flush of youth.
"I’ve just had the black snake treatment," announced Terry, reaching for the bottle of red we were sharing with mutual friends and topping up our glasses. I had not heard the term and wondered, for one terrible moment, if he had ventured into the wild and been attacked by a venomous reptile.
"Black snake?" I asked. "Colonoscopy," he explained. "Oh." If you think about it, there’s not a lot more you can say in such a situation. "Me too," said another member of our group. A pattern was beginning to emerge here, for I had endured the same procedure two months earlier and for the past week had been listening to the work colleague seated nearest to me perform a daily countdown towards his. "One day to go. If you hear any moans coming from the vicinity of the Roma Street Parkland apartments tonight, that will be me," he had announced that very morning. I sympathised.
There are better ways to spend an evening than sitting expectantly on the edge of a lounge chair chug-a-lugging litres of viletasting liquid and waiting for it to produce an effect on your intestinal tract similar to the eruption of an Icelandic volcano.
My partner, sympathetic as ever, banned me from her bed on the night I did this, directing me to the guest room down the hallway. "You might explode in the middle of the night," she said, edging away from me as I took another swig of the "preparation".
"It’s not quite like that," I pleaded, but she wasn’t taking any chances and I couldn’t blame her. So I retired alone, occasionally uttering dramatic groaning noises to see if anyone would rush to my assistance.
No-one did. If I was to die I would die alone, although I’d hoped for a less spectacular end than death by spontaneous internal combustion.
There has to be an easier preparation for this test and if the medical profession could find one quickly, I and several million others – and their partners – would be grateful.
I was just thankful that Terry hadn’t made his black snake allusion before I’d had my procedure. I have a morbid fear of snakes and would not have coped well with the thought of the doctor standing there holding a black python lookalike. "I didn’t realise it was black," I said to Terry, the image of a 10-metre reptile coiled on the floor of the operating theatre now fixed in my mind. "Did you have a look?" "Absolutely," he said. "Didn’t you?" "No," I said, recalling I had been all but rigid with fear and unable to move.
My next colonoscopy was not due for another three years. Would this be long enough to erase the image of the huge black python with the curved fangs and red eyes about to attack me from behind?
Probably not. Why, suddenly, am I surrounded by men having colonoscopies? Could I be ageing? Surely not. The nightmares, at least, are becoming less frequent and I’ve stopped sitting upright in bed and yelling "No! Not the black snake!" I await life’s next hurdle with interest.
<a href="http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/run-for-it-men-its-the-black-snake/story-fn6ck8la-1226003051703tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/run-for-it-men-its-the-black-snake/story-fn6ck8la-1226003051703Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:19:24 GMT 00:00″>Brace yourself, it's the black snake
Tags: countdown, mutual friends, intestinal tract, Glasses, black snake
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