It’s my 47th birthday today, so I started the celebration last week with a fun gift for someone my age:
A colonoscopy!
Colorectal cancer was the second leading cause of cancer death in the US last year – and the number is now much smaller. From 2021, the official recommendation is to be tested from the age of 45 instead of the age of 50, whether it is a home test or a full camera when the sun is not shining.
Abandoned disease especially plagues Mexican American men like me, and many go undiagnosed. Only 46% of us hombres are current, compared to 60% of white men, 61% of Puerto Ricans and 49% of Central and South Americans, according to the American Cancer Society.
The statistics are even worse when it comes to people in my age range: only 9% of Mexican Americans between 45 and 49 entered our colonies, compared to 20% of our white peers.
The American Cancer Society cites “structural discrimination, high odds of poverty and language barriers.” The reason I delayed was more specific:
Therefore.
My career at The Times began when my mother died of ovarian cancer after years of doctors dismissing her health problems. I lost my classmates to leukemia when I was an undergraduate at Chapman University 25 years ago. Random stomach aches have plagued me since college – the amount of stressful work, I always thought.
But when my doctor did a colonoscopy two years ago, after I turned 45, I let the day go by. When he sent me a home test, I let it expire.
The idea of a tube up my tuchus didn’t scare me, and neither did preparing to drink a foul-tasting liquid to cleanse your intestinal tract. I didn’t think I needed a colonoscopy yet – and I always had a good excuse.
You are very busy with work. The annual statistics I passed have a few red flags. I eat healthy. While I love my Manhattans, I don’t drink as much as I used to. I don’t work out much, but the pounds keep coming off. Besides, high cholesterol is a male problem in my family, not cancer – so why worry?
In November, my doctor gently scolded me for ignoring my 2024 colonoscopy date. Good. Two days at home and a column without it? It is a livelihood.
The earliest appointment available through my provider was in September, or I could go out of network at no additional cost. Part of me wanted to delay for the usual reasons. Then I remembered it’s an election year, and I should be talking about the middle classes in their final weeks instead of taking my mind off it.
I let the Mexicans—what I call text chat with my closest guys—know what I was going to do. Memes citing a sad scene from “Bzing Saddles” and others too rude to mention in a family newspaper soon littered my phone.
Then the sad truth emerged that we are not young men anymore.
“I need to do that too,” wrote my cousin Plas.
“That’ll be me in April,” his brother Vic chimed in.
“We will all bow out one day but hopefully not soon,” added Art, a childhood friend of Mexican citizen Aristotle.
My father, a 30-year-old survivor of a prostatectomy, took me to the clinic in Orange on Friday.
“They just give you anesthesia and you go to sleep,” Papi said in Spanish, recalling when he performed his own colonoscopy nearly 15 years ago. Then you wake up and they say to you, ‘Relax, relax. It will be fine.’
Why hasn’t he found anything?
“My doctor never told me to do another one,” he said. “It’s good that they’re making new people now. You’re young! You’ll be fine.”
There are all sorts of colonoscopy posts, from Katie Couric to Dave Barry, describing the procedure in language better suited to covering Fallujah or “The Factor.” But it’s nowhere near as amazing as people think.
Of course, swallowing fluids the night before was a challenge – try drinking three liters of anything in three hours, go to bed, and wake up six hours later for the last one. But the pharmacists gave me a powder that made it taste and smell like orange blossom water – I think it would pair well with mezcal. Of course, I couldn’t be more than a few steps away from the toilet – but what happened next was that nature took its course, even though the dial was turned to 11.
I filled out the paperwork, changed into a nightgown, laid on the bed covered with a warm blanket and waited my turn humming ranchera and Beatles songs. Patients were wheeled in and out of the colonoscopy room with the efficiency of a conveyor belt.
The doctor introduced himself, and the anesthesiologist did his thing. The nurse asked me to turn on my side, and everything went black.
The colonoscopy took half an hour, and I felt nothing. My only complaint: the medical team was working on “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When I discovered that everyone in the room was probably a Gen Xer and the song was a masterpiece, the last thing I needed to hear at that moment was Anthony Kiedis lamenting his drug days.
Immediately after waking up, the nurse asked me to put on my clothes – many people were waiting to leave next. As he rolled me in the wheelchair, I read the paper someone had given me. The anesthesia hadn’t worn off yet, so I didn’t understand anything except for a word I hoped I wouldn’t see:
Polyps. Three of them.
The nurse said the doctor had successfully removed the tumors and was sending them for a biopsy.
“Should I be worried?” I remember humming.
He replied that the doctor would have spoken to my father and me immediately if he had found any infections that looked dangerous, but a biopsy would tell more.
I started to calm myself on the way home. I should have gotten a colonoscopy when my doctor suggested it a year and a half ago. I should have asked for another home kit, at least. And I worried about my generation: All the other patients that day were at least 20 years older than me.
There are no Latinos.
“How old are you going to be?” Papi asked trying to cheer me up. “I still miss you when you were born!” He said it was best for the doctor to remove the polyps before they turned into cancer and I encouraged him to get a colonoscopy right away.
“We always think the worst when we hear bad news,” said Papi as he opened the door to my house and made sure I sat down. “We can’t. We just have to hope for the best.”
The Mexicans were equally supportive.
“It was like that [a colonoscopy] early last year,” Art captioned the post. I should do another one every five years instead of 10.”
“The same thing happens to me and I have to have it every three years,” replied Dave.
Butcher – we call him that because that was his job before he retired after surviving Stage 4 colon cancer 15 years ago – had the best words of comfort. He posted a GIF of a man shouting “All Good!!!” while sticking his head into the clean pipe.
I laughed at the Mexican comment as I tried to focus on the positive. The two small polyps were flat – they were hard to see and often turned into cancer, so thank God the doctor caught them. One was 10 millimeters – the size at which gastroenterologists start to really worry because large polyps can turn into something bad.
Happy birthday, indeed.
I get the biopsy results in about a week. In the meantime, I continue to read pictures of my polyps like Rosetta Stone and find comfort in asking for an earlier colonoscopy instead of a later one.
My hope is that I come out OK, of course. I also hope that others read this and realize that they shouldn’t delay something so simple – and so important.
Hopefully, I stopped being a pendejo before it’s too late.
