Beware the Ides of March

Last March, early morning March 15th, to be exact, Doctor Steven ****** went where no man had gone before.

If you’re me, you clean house like Christ is coming to dinner before the maid comes. Way I see it, you’re not a packrat or a Pigpen until others know you are, any more than a tree falling in the woods unwitnessed makes a sound. Ditto for dental visits; I never brush or floss more diligently than I do in the days before seeing my sultry Persian DDS. Likewise, I clear-cut the dark side of my moon the day before my colonoscopy. If you took that candid confession to mean that I Brazilian waxed myself, you were half right: from the taint forward, conservation; from the gooch back, deforestation.

Much has been said about the cleansing agent one must imbibe the night before his/her colonoscopy, and rightfully so. Not even the gut bug I caught in Kuwait sentenced me to the toilet as many times, or condemned me to it for longer stretches, than the liquid laxative my gastro prescribed. Spindletop gushers continued throughout the night and into the next day. I’m not kidding when I say that I painted three separate Jackson Pollock forgeries before transitioning from the surgical center’s waiting room to its preprocedural area. The final aftershock arrived during the modest brunch to which I'd treated myself more than an hour after the procedure's end.

Checking in, the receptionist asked for my ID. “Why,” I volleyed, “who’s conning their way into a colonoscopy? I don’t even want to undergo this emasculating, invasive procedure on doctor’s orders, you think I’m here, what, as a favor to a friend? An "Impractical Jokers" segment, maybe? You don't sincerely believe that a thriving black market for colonoscopy surrogates exists? Do these freelance buttholes-for-hire advertise online, or do prospective employers pull up to Home Depot’s transient labor pools like, “Will work for food, huh? Define ‘work.’”