Sandi Kahn Shelton

Okay, everything you’ve heard about having a colonoscopy is right.

It’s not bad.

And it can save your life.

I was a big baby about it, the way I am about a lot of medical stuff I don’t want to think about.

Even the prep, which everyone says is the Very Worst Thing in the Whole World, was not that bad. I was given pills instead of the yucky liquid stuff, thirty-two pills, to be exact, with specific instructions as to how to take them.

The worst part by far was the dreading…and oh, yeah, fasting all day yesterday wasn’t so great. I kept forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to be eating, and would find myself thinking, “Ah, I know what I need! Some crackers!” And starting for the kitchen before I remembered…ah, yes, there’s a reason I’m so hungry.

All day, I felt like I was in some kind of countdown–four hours until I have to start the prep…three and a half hours ’til prep time…oh, NO! IN TWENTY SHORT MINUTES I HAVE TO TAKE FOUR PILLS THAT ARE GOING TO MAKE ME FEEL JUST AWFUL ALL NIGHT LONG, AND AFTER THAT I HAVE TO TAKE 16 MORE OF THEM AND THEN 12 MORE OF THEM TOMORROW MORNING! AND THEN WHAT IF I GO TO THIS APPOINTMENT AND IT TURNS OUT THAT I HAVE COLON CANCER THAT IS SO FAR ADVANCED THAT THEY CAN’T CURE IT AND I SHOULD HAVE COME IN YEARS AGO BUT I DIDN’T?

(One of the little known perks of being a writer is that you can always get to the worst case scenario in 0.2 seconds.)

But then the time came and I just did it. Told my crazy monkey mind to take the night off and go off somewhere, and I took the pills and spent the evening reading a very good book and admiring the decor of our bathroom.

I woke up in the morning before the alarm went off at 6 and took the rest of the pills, admired the decor some more, re-told the monkey mind that we would be NOT thinking about colon cancer anymore this morning…and by 9:20, we were on our way to the Endoscopy Center.

Once there, I was fine. The nurses were all chatty and nice. We discussed books we were all reading; one of them had read one of my novels, and we talked about that. We talked about where we get our hair colored and how awkward it is to break up with a hairdresser. I put on a hospital gown, and they started a saline IV and filled out a questionnaire about my health.

I was a little taken aback when one of the nurses asked me, as part of routine questions, if I had a Living Will. I must have looked startled–I mean, this is just a colonoscopy, right?–because she leaned over and touched me on the arm and said, “Don’t worry. Your Living Will wouldn’t count for anything here anyway. If anything goes wrong, we are going to revive you!”

Oh. Good then.

We moved along to the room itself, and I was told to lie down on my left side on the bed, underneath the sheet. We talked about all the good food I was planning to eat later on, and then the doctor came in and asked me how I felt.

The nurse said, “Okay, we’re ready to get started.” She smiled at me and said, “Good night! You’ll be back in thirty minutes!”

And everything suddenly went black. No fading out, no count to ten. Just–GONE.

The very next moment the doctor was standing at the foot of my bed, speaking loudly: “I HAVE NOTHING BUT GOOD NEWS FOR YOU!” And my husband was sitting next to me, and it was 35 minutes later.

I got up and got dressed. Everything had gone well, he said. He did remove two tiny little polyps that looked absolutely benign, nothing to worry about, he said.

“No evidence of any cancer,” he said and smiled. When I had had my consultation in July, my mother had only been dead a month, and I was shaking the whole time we talked.

I have to go back again and have another in three years, due to the family history. But next time I won’t be scared. 

This is what happens to you when your mom dies of colon cancer: doctors start insisting that you get your own colon looked at.

I’ve tried to explain that I’m not the type for procedures like colonoscopies. I’m sure that I don’t LIKE them, I said. And besides that, I feel just fine, colon-wise.

I didn’t get very far with that line of reasoning. Doctors have heard it all before. One of them–my mother’s surgeon, actually–said to me, “You know, your mom would be alive today if she’d had a colonoscopy a few decades ago. Colon cancer is very slow-growing, and we could have nipped that polyp right out of there before it even turned into cancer…you don’t want this to happen to you!”

It’s true. I don’t.

So I signed up and went to a nice gastroenterologist for a consultation appointment. He seemed very calm and he assured me of many things: It won’t hurt. I won’t know anything about it because I’ll go to sleep. The drugs are very, very good–so good that some people actually WANT to come for colonoscopies. AND, best of all, he said they now have a pill you can take rather than drink gallons of horrible liquid…for the, you know, colon-scouring you have to do beforehand.

“It’s nothing, it’s a piece of cake,” he said. “I do ten of these a day, and everyone does great.”

So I made my appointment and then two days later, I suddenly had a great idea about how to get around this colonoscopy business. I called up and canceled my appointment, cleverly rescheduling it for a date so far in advance that surely the world would have ended by then.

But–quelle surprise!–the world did NOT end, and now, unless those California wildfires suddenly engulf the whole nation in the next 24 hours, it looks like I’m really going to have to go through with this.

Today is my last day eating real food. Tomorrow I am to eat ONLY jello, chicken broth, and drink tea all day long. That’s it. And at 5 o’clock, I have to take 20 pills, four at a time, 15 minutes apart, drinking lots and lots of liquid with them.

According to all reports, that’s when the real fun begins.

Then I have to wake up at 6 in the morning on Friday (like I would have been sleeping, who are they kidding?)  and then I’m to take the last 12 pills.

And then…the colonoscopy itself. 
Sheeeesh.

I’ve always gotten myself to do hard stuff by giving myself rewards. A trip to the dentist means that I get to order a black turtleneck shirt from Lands’ End. If I have to get a filling or a crown, I get a skirt, too. Regular doctor visits with blood work mean new earrings and possibly a milk shake.

But I frankly don’t know what will be good enough to get me through a colonoscopy. I think it’s going to take a trip to Europe or something, possibly a stint in the Greek Isles.

Of course, being told I’m not going to get colon cancer anytime soon–that would be good, too. Along with a nice lunch.   

My friend Lynn and I have decided to embark on a new project: giving workshops to help people write their memoirs.

I have taught writing workshops before, but this one already has me jumping up and down in excitement because it’s different. Instead of being for people who already know how to write, we want to invite people who don’t already think of themselves as writers, because they have stories to tell just the same.

These are the really fun stories of our lives, the stories you tell in the car or recount over Thanksgiving dinner, or whenever you get a new close friend. In my family, they are the stories of the time my sister decided to cut off the bumps on her tongue with the scissors, and the day my brother sold his horrible-looking potty chair at the neighbor’s rummage sale. And the tale of my grandmother shooting my grandfather because he came home early from a business trip without telling her–well, that one always gets told too. It’s funny, mostly because she missed.

I think we’re all hungry for stories about where we came from and WHO we came from. We want the details about our parents’ upbringings and the story that would explain whatever made them think they belonged together, and why in the world they chose those jobs they chose, and why do they save string and keep the heat turned down to sub-livable temperatures?

And our kids want to know the same things about us!

I want to encourage people to write about the popular kids’ table in the lunchroom in middle school, and what they thought about when they looked outside their bedroom window, and who did they go to the prom with in high school, and who did they first have a crush on. The stories can go on and on and on: who was your next door neighbor, and your first pet that you truly loved, and when did you know what kind of work you really, really wanted to do, and when did somebody first make you so mad that you stood up for yourself in spite of the fact that you were scared?

See? Isn’t this going to be fun?

So anyway, if you live anywhere near Guilford, Connecticut, and you want to be in the workshop, you need to let us know. Email me right away! Today! The course starts next week.

Lynn and I are psyched about this. She’s a biographer who has written very cool biographies about Gregory Peck and Josephine Baker–the latter which was optioned for film by Diana Ross. She also used to write for the New York Times and worked for Christian Dior in Paris, and she’s gone everywhere and done everything, and is hilarious, to boot.

My contribution is that I write novels and for ten years wrote a column about my family life in the newspaper. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE the little details of people’s lives, the things they might forget. We both can help people shape the stories, get down all the details–and figure out what to write about in the first place.

And even if you don’t live close by and can’t take the workshop, take my advice and start writing these stories down for yourself. Keep a little book, and write down the funny things your kids say. You think you’ll remember them forever, but you won’t.

And like Bernie Siegel, the cancer doc says, just the act of writing down details of your life–even the painful ones–can be as therapeutic an exercise as going to therapy. Writing can heal us all.

Okay, it has to be said. I do love google, I RELY on google, I am googling people nearly 58 times a day…and yet, isn’t there something just a little creepy about gmail? (Gmail being, of course, the google email service.)

Here’s what gets me. You’re reading along some hilarious message that somebody wrote to you about the meal they had in the Japanese restaurant the other day…and then your eye kind of drifts over to the right of the screen, and you can’t help but notice that all the ads are for other Japanese restaurants and little machines to make your own sushi. Stuff like that.

Huh! I thought when this first happened to me. What an amazing coincidence this is!

But then a friend was writing to me about her problems with her health insurance…and sure enough, over at the right, google had some dental plans to advertise! And when Ben wrote to me to tell me about some toys he was buying for Charlie, google was already two steps ahead of us, with toys to recommend.

Gives me the shivers.

Still, I was willing to go on this way–but today google just kind of overstepped the bounds of politeness, I think. Google has gone too far.

A friend emailed me some pictures of her baby–an adorable, blue-eyed angel of a baby, smiling at another baby while several moms sat in a circle and looked on, fondly.

And what were the ads that google thought were appropriate for this? Baby photographers, perhaps? Even diapers?

No.

The ads along the side were for: (1) tummy tuck surgery–”lose those extra pounds NOW” (2) a recipe for an Oreo cake, (3) and a website called Are You Ugly.com, where you can take a quiz “like an ugly celeb.”

Are they chuckling over at google? Or is this a computer’s idea of how to get back at human beings and their smiling offspring?

I was on the train to New York the other day, to go visit Stephanie and see how she’s settling in to her sophomore year of school–and when I handed my ticket to the conductor, it turned out that I was in the presence of none other than the Conductor to the Stars!

This is a guy my husband wrote a feature story about, because he recognizes EVERYBODY who rides the train! He’s amazing that way. (Full disclosure here: I never recognize anyone. After the Thanksgiving Day Parade one year in New York, our family was walking behind a guy with a funny hair situation going on, and my husband kept poking me and nodding toward the man, trying to get me to realize that we were within 23 inches of The Donald Himself. Ivana and Tiffany were right there with him. Did I know who this was? Any of them? Not a chance.)

Anyway, because my picture used to run in the newspaper every week back when I wrote a weekly column, this conductor (his name is Bobby) recognized me, and for a while, we had fun talking about writing and conducting trains and authors we love, and then it turned out WE BOTH HAVE BLOGS.  

Well, I couldn’t wait to go read his blog. And it has been such a pleasure, going back through his archives and reading old posts, because he’s very funny and warm and has such a good sense of humor.

Here’s the link to his blog. It’s called Bobby Derailed, and you’ll enjoy it as much as I have, I’m sure.

Best of all, though, please scroll down and read what he wrote on the anniversary of September 11, and then go and read his entry from last year, which you can find here: http://bobbyderailed.blogspot.com/2006/09/september-13th-2001.html.

It’s one of the most moving pieces I’ve read about September 11th from someone who was right there witnessing the scene so soon after it happened.

So many of us have transplanted ourselves across the country so many times that we don’t know anymore whether we’re Southerners or Northerners.

I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents who were both from old-time Southern families. When I was growing up we had to say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” and eat grits for breakfast. When I was 12, I moved to Southern California, where I discovered that saying “yes ma’am” was considered a sarcastic act that could get you in trouble with teachers. And grits? Nobody out there had heard of them. (I was just as glad.)

Just about the time I’d adjusted to California culture, it was time to move to the Northeast, where I learned to talk about tag sales and bubblers and eat grinders. The cheese that people put on pizza? That’s called moots here (rhymes with foots.) Oh, yeah–and the other weird thing: you have to ASK for it on your pizza. Pizza doesn’t automatically come with moots. Just don’t call it mozz-a-rella when you say it. People laugh and point.

Anyhow, when I came here, people laughed when I talked, saying I talked Southern. And my Southern relatives were horrified whenever I would talk to them: “You sound just like a Yankee, honey. You need to come back HOME.”

So which was I? Dixie or Yankee?

If you’ve got the same problem, you don’t have to sit up nights trying to figure out which one you are. Go click on this link and take The Yankee or Dixie quiz and you can find out once and for all just who you are, based on nothing more than the words you use. (Don’t worry–there’s no quiz about the Civil War or red states vs. blue states.)

It’s all about if you say aunt or ant. Do you call athletic shoes sneakers or tennis shoes? Is a drive-thru liquor store a party barn or a brew-through? (They have DRIVE-THRU LIQUOR STORES?!?)

I’ve lost a lot of my Southern dialect these days, but I still scored 55% Dixie, just from my leftovers.

I’m not sure my Southern relatives would be all that pleased.

This comes, thanks to Dorothy Thompson, who posted it on the Yahoo writers page. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, too–the times I’ve talked to her on the telephone, I LOVE hearing her accent. That’s the thing I miss, living up here in the cold north: those soft Southern sounds. And, of course, the utilitarianism of the word “y’all.” It really is a word that can’t be replaced with “youse guys.” I’m sorry. It just can’t.

I know, I know. It doesn’t seem possible that “sexy” and “cancer” could ever be in the same sentence.

But talk to Kris Carr for a few minutes, and you’ll understand. She’s a 36-year-old actress who, four years ago, thought she had the world’s worse hangover after partying like a rock star. Turned out she had inoperable cancer, a cancer so rare they don’t even have a treatment for it. There’s no ribbons, no walks, no rubber bracelet to wear.  

A lot of people–most likely I’m one of them–would have  would have just heard their diagnosis and gone and gotten under their beds and sucked their thumbs and cried, but Kris, who says she’s always been full of sass, decided instead that it was time to give cancer a makeover. As she put it, since there was no cure and no treatment, she might as well figure out her own answers. To hear her tell it, she pulled a Dumpster up to her life, and started renovating: learned how to meditate, eat nutritional meals, take care of herself; then she reached out to other young women with cancer, and best of all, decided to learn how she wanted to live the rest of her life. (It didn’t involve lying in her bed and thinking about tumors, believe me.)

It all sounds like one big cliche–and believe me, I have a very overdeveloped cliche-detector, and sometimes things that are supposed to be “inspirational” and “heartwarming” make me want to run in the opposite direction. But Kris’s accounting of her kick-ass four years dealing with cancer doesn’t shy away from the tough parts. She just doesn’t have time to stay wallowing in self-pity. Anybody who reacted to the news she has Stage IV incurable cancer by taking her camera along with her to doctor’s appointments gets my vote every time!

The name of the book–and oh, yeah, there’s a documentary too–is “Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips,” and it comes from the fact that when Kris would send mass emails out to all the other “cancer babes,” that’s what she would type in the subject line. And whenever she mentioned cancer, she would always capitalize the “C.” Finally one of the other women said they should stop giving cancer the benefit of a capital “C”: that was giving this disease waaaay too much power. In fact, they decided, they should even misspell the word. Spell it CANSER or something. I love that! That you can hurt cancer’s feelings by not even bothering to spell its name correctly.

Anyway, click here to go buy her book, even if you don’t have cancer…it’s that good, and by all means, click here to go visit her website and blog. (There’s even a little movie there you can watch.)

Honestly, she makes life sound like so much fun that you’ll be glad you’re alive.    

This is a picture of my mother in the hospital, with her little dog Bear, a few days before she died.

Bear is looking at Peggy, my mother’s friend who had brought him to the hospital for a visit. Peggy lived across the hall from my mother and she now (bless her) raises Bear. He was restless and agitated in the bed, and a few minutes after this picture was taken, my mother said, “Okay, he knows I love him. He needs to leave now.”

I have been thinking about her a lot lately. I miss her so much, even though in the last year of her life, all I did was worry about her all the time. She was always feeling sick and tired, and she was constantly ticked off at her friend, Mike, whom she said was too clingy and also smelled bad. They took turns calling the ambulance on each other, like two children tattling on each other to the principal.

Yep, it was a precarious life there in the senior housing complex in Clearwater, Florida, and she was always getting into scrapes. When I went through her papers at the end, I saw that she was often getting fined because Bear “would urinate on the rugs in the public area and sometimes on the other residents.”

I remember she would call me up in outrage that somebody in the hallway hadn’t moved out of the way in time when it should have been clear to anyone that Bear was lifting his leg! “And now,” she’d sputter, “I have to pay the fine because SHE didn’t get out of the way when Bear was going to pee!”

“Why don’t you teach him not to pee on people?” I’d ask her, but she had no idea that was the kind of thing that dogs and humans could ever negotiate. Dogs do whatever they wish. Didn’t I know anything?

It’s odd how when someone dies far away, you almost can’t wrap your head around the fact that it’s really over. I still go to the phone, thinking I have to call her, I have to make sure she’s okay, and then I remember a split-second later that she’s gone. I feel sadness mixed with relief. Ohhh…she’s not in the hospital again. She hasn’t gotten evicted. Whew.

As though those things would be worse somehow than what IS true: that she’s dead.

I’m so glad I had those days with her in the last month, but of course they don’t feel like they were anywhere near enough of what they should have been. I guess the mind looks for meaning somehow, and there was no meaning. Looking back, it boils down to the fact that one ordinary Wednesday afternoon, she called me up crying and said she thought she had cancer all over her body and that her doctor was making her have a colonoscopy to find out for sure, and then two days later her surgeon called and said, yup, that’s pretty much what we found…and then I went to see her, and for a while it seemed like she might have some time left, but then the time ran out more quickly than anybody expected, and the last days were very hard, and then there was a moment at the very end when she looked up at me and talked to me in such a way that I could remember that once, a very long time ago, before a lot of the bad stuff started happening–the mental illnesses and the separations and the charging thousands of dollars on Home Shopping Network–I had been her beloved child, the one she loved so much and took such good care of.

And then, just when I remembered that, she closed her eyes and died.

I spent two days cleaning out her house and giving her possessions to her friends, and then I came back home. And when I came back home, there were these new babies to cuddle, and a book to finish, and a whole rich life going on right where it had been going before, and after a week or so, it was almost hard to remember those days in Florida when I was there with her, pushing her in her wheelchair and talking about what the end might be like, and whether she should have another cigarette before we went back inside, and wasn’t that a funny time when my uncle sang that song in a bar. All of those conversations–the mundane and the tragic–all mashed up together.

One night when I was there, I had to do a phone interview with a book group that was reading “A Piece of Normal,” and my cell phone would only work outside the hospital. My mother wanted to come with me outside, but I didn’t want her to. I was worried that she would be too cold or too bored, and she’d be stuck outside with me until I finished being interviewed, but no, no, she wanted to come. So I pushed her wheelchair, and we sat outside while I talked to the book group, and it was the first time I had ever had any book-related thing to do with my mother present. My books were sort of abstract to her. She read them, she said “how nice,” but she never heard me talk about them. I was interviewed for about 45 minutes, and she just sat there beside me, in her wheelchair. I was surprised to look over and see that she was smiling and listening–really listening–and when I hung up from talking to the group, she started to cry. She said, “I never knew what your life is really like…I didn’t understand how you felt about your books.”

So there are all these things, these little memories of her, that rise like bubbles to the surface of my mind, and then pop. My mother was the only person left whom I had known for my whole life, and some days now are heavy with the knowledge that there was so much we didn’t get to yet.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to call Peggy and see if Bear has peed on anyone lately. I’d like to think he gave that up.

I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office, trying to make the best of things by reading all the People magazines from the last two or three years. I hate going to the doctor, and this one had a waiting room that is so small that your knees practically bump into the knees of the person sitting across from you. People’s breathing takes up the whole space.

I was thinking good thoughts, though–you know, how a non-ostentatious waiting room is actually a good thing. It shows a doctor who’s not all about flash and bells and whistles, who’s more about the caring and the healing.

The receptionist opens the little glass window and looks at me and says in her loudest voice: “SANDRA? IS YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY THE SAME AS LAST TIME?”

“Yes,” I say. (Last time was eight days previously, when I went in for a physical.)

She then proceeds to read out all my insurance information for the benefit of the people in the waiting room. “IT’S UNITED HEALTHCARE…BLAH BLAH BLAH…SUBSCRIBER IS BLAH BLAH BLAH?”

“Yes,” I say.

“AND YOU STILL LIVE AT THE SAME ADDRESS?”

“Yes. Same address.”

Because–who knows?–maybe I might have forgotten which address I lived at last week when I came in, or perhaps didn’t remember moving, she yells out the address, complete with the town, zip code and phone number, just to jog my memory. Was even my phone number still the same?

“YES,” I say. “It’s all still the same as it was eight days ago when I was here. Insurance, address, phone number, everything.”

She regards me for a moment and then slams the window shut.

A moment later, though, she opens the window again, and this time her attention is beamed on another patient, an unhappy woman sitting next to me, who (we’d all heard) had had a CT scan the day before and had some kind of bad reaction to the dye.

“MA’AM? MA’AM? EXACTLY WHAT PART OF YOUR BODY WAS THE CT SCAN ON??”

The entire population of the waiting room burst out laughing. 

I would just like to report that pigs are flying.

The universe has evidently gone way off course–because, despite every single logical thing that I can think of, I won my battle with the mail-order prescription plan…and actually GOT A REFUND CHECK IN THE MAIL FROM THEM FOR THE ENTIRE ORDER OF BIRTH CONTROL PILLS I’D ORDERED.

This was not supposed to happen. In fact, the last customer service representative I spoke to–a nice woman, actually, whom I managed to have a long conversation with, during which neither one of us threatened the other–told me that I would not win.

“Write all the letters you want, but pigs will fly before you win this one,” she said very politely.

Here was the issue, which I wrote about here: the doctor had innocently written the prescription the wrong way, saying that I was to receive one month at a time, refillable eleven separate times, rather than writing it for three months, refillable three separate times. You would think a mail-order prescription company could cope with this–but mine decided to charge me the same price (SIXTY DOLLARS) for one month of pills as they charge for three months of pills, claiming that the money isn’t actually FOR the pills themselves, but is simply the co-pay.

This seemed perfectly reasonable to the NINE people I spoke to at the mail order company.

“It’s the CO-PAY,” they kept saying to me, in louder and louder voices, as though I must be a bit dim not to get this. “The CO-PAY.” 

So I called my company’s corporate headquarters and they instantly realized this was a horrible thing, and said that this was unacceptable. I explained to them that pigs would have to fly before anything would change, and they seemed upset to hear about that, since pigs so rarely take flight. Still, they asked me for a letter detailing the names and phone numbers of every single person I had spoken to–and not having anything better to do (my novel was due, but who cared?), I wrote all this down and sent it in.

Three days later, I got a phone message from the corporate headquarters woman who had been so outraged on my behalf, saying, “Hello? I know we spoke about SOMETHING on the phone the other day, but I didn’t take any notes and I’ve completely forgotten all about what we said. Will you just call me and tell me the whole thing again?”

By then I had run out of energy. Every now and then, this happens to me with hopeless causes. I realized I should write my novel and not devote any more precious brain cells to fixing this.

And then…a check came in the mail. For the full amount.

There were the usual pieces of paper that accompany corporate-looking checks, but none of the things written on them made any sense. No one said, “This is payment for the way we ripped you off. And by the way, that was not the CO-PAY.”

It just said the check was issued for Reason J. When you look up Reason J on the back of the form, it said: “If you have any questions why you got this check, call customer service.”

You know? I don’t think I will. They’re too busy dodging those flying pigs, I’m sure.