The best way to treat cancer is to find it early. So when I turned 60 in June, I went for a check-up. COVID-19 might have kept me away. But I had made the appointment before the pandemic started, and by then the crisis had dialed back a notch. I didn’t want to cancel, so masked up and went in to get poked and prodded.
Everything seemed shipshape: heart beating, lungs receiving air. My doctor scanned his laptop: 10 years since my last colonoscopy — a probe with a tiny camera, checking out the intestines for cancerous polyps. Time for another.
I grimaced and echoed the classic toddler complaint, “Do I hafta?” thinking of guzzling a gallon of MiraLAX, used to clean out the plumbing the evening before the procedure. Not fun.
No, the doctor said, now there is a home test ...
Great, I said, hopping up, let’s do that. Never considering what a home test meant. Forgetting all about it, in fact, until a cube-shaped box showed up, a Cologuard kit from Exact Sciences Laboratories of Madison, Wisconsin.
Here it is probably best not to go into too much graphic detail, though that is coming. You might want to set this aside until after breakfast.
Everything seemed shipshape: heart beating, lungs receiving air. My doctor scanned his laptop: 10 years since my last colonoscopy — a probe with a tiny camera, checking out the intestines for cancerous polyps. Time for another.
I grimaced and echoed the classic toddler complaint, “Do I hafta?” thinking of guzzling a gallon of MiraLAX, used to clean out the plumbing the evening before the procedure. Not fun.
No, the doctor said, now there is a home test ...
Great, I said, hopping up, let’s do that. Never considering what a home test meant. Forgetting all about it, in fact, until a cube-shaped box showed up, a Cologuard kit from Exact Sciences Laboratories of Madison, Wisconsin.
Here it is probably best not to go into too much graphic detail, though that is coming. You might want to set this aside until after breakfast.
In the kit: is a plastic bracket to be placed over the toilet; a stout white jar, or “sample container,” that sits in the center of the bracket and is aimed for; and a little vial with a wand in it — rather like mascara — that is later dipped into the contents of the jar. The wand is there because Cologuard tests for two things: both DNA revealing early cancer, and the blood that can be a sign of late-stage cancers.
Filling the jar is ... not a pleasant process. A certain blank determination is required — emptying your mind and following instructions. When I was at Step 5(f) “Turn the lid to tighten until it does not tighten anymore,” I had a thought, and that thought was, “Who opens the jar?”
Filling the jar is ... not a pleasant process. A certain blank determination is required — emptying your mind and following instructions. When I was at Step 5(f) “Turn the lid to tighten until it does not tighten anymore,” I had a thought, and that thought was, “Who opens the jar?”
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