~Monday~ It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which for state employees means a holiday. I slept in this morning, until 11:00 or 11:30.
That Dulcolax “did its thing” last night before bed, and I started off the day well on my way to an “emptiness” I don’t want to feel again for at least another five years.
At 6PM tonight, I had to “bring in the big guns,” whose job it was to pick up where the Dulcolax left off and “kick it up (or out, if you will) a notch.” When I had the prescription filled yesterday and saw the size of the box and the name of the product, I thought two things: 1) “Damn, is this for a group of people?” and 2) “Is there popcorn up in there?”
I mean, seriously, who names these products? The one I took for my colonoscopy 5 years ago was called, “GoLYTELY,” whose truth-in-advertising name should really have been, “GoHeavily&Often.”
Up until 6PM, I could only eat “clear liquids”—if you can call ingesting liquids eating; it sounds a lot like drinking to me. I didn’t have anything clear in the house to have for breakfast, other than black coffee (which for some reason counts as clear even though it’s fairly opaque, but I digress…), and I don’t like drinking coffee on an empty stomach.
So basically, I skipped breakfast and went to the grocery store to get a few of the precious few things that were on the clear list, even fewer of which I actually like. I ended up with 2 bottles of lemon-line Gatorade (which I don’t particularly like, and it’s the first time I’ve ever bought any for myself), some diet ginger ale, a large bottle of apple juice, some peach (“red” and “purple” were not allowed) Jello, and one container each of beef and chicken broth. Whew. Makes me full just thinking about it. Not.
For “lunch,” I chose the beef broth, which although wasn’t filling in any iota of a sense, definitely tasted better than I anticipated. I was kind of surprised to read the advertisement on the package that said something to the effect of, “Enjoy eating it warm as a soup, or drinking it cold as a beverage.” Really? I mean have you ever had anyone offer, “Coffee, soda, or beef broth?”
Before starting the MoviPrep regimen at 6PM, I had chicken broth for dinner.
Actually starting at 6:15 (Shhhh, don’t tell anyone I started late!), I drank 8 ounces of the MoviPrep, which actually didn’t taste much worse than the Gatorade to me, and then another 8 ounces more of it in 15-minute intervals for the next 45 minutes. Once that was done, I drank two 8-ounce glasses of apple juice. Woohoo!
At one point after drinking (or was that eating?) all that, I had two crazy thoughts, about 20 minutes apart: “Maybe I’ll go see a move at the $1.50 movie tonight, since I’m not doing anything else,” and later, even after jettisoning the movie idea due to it not being a good place to be when things started “happening,” I thought, “I could run to the gym.” A rumbling in my stomach that sounded like a severe thunderstorm rolling in put out that bright idea faster than an altar boy with a candlesnuffer on a flickering flame.
Come 11:30, I wanted to get to bed so that I could get up at 3:30 and repeat that exhilarating process once again, and I thought, “Okay, it’s been about 5 hours since I took that stuff, and I am still going like the Energizer Bunny, but not in a good way. That means when I finish the round that’s going to start at 3:30, it’ll be 4:30, and five hours from then, I’ll still be going.” My procedure was scheduled for 9:00. Oy.
As a complete digression: I’m tagging this entry with both an “exercise” tag and a “lower body” tag, just to reward my bowels for all their hard work today.