Father’s death made colonoscopy a bearable task

MY FATHER was a relentlessly upbeat guy who allowed no room in his life for bad news. This quality, which made him so gregarious and warm, is also what let colon cancer eventually kill him. He loved good food and bad jokes, scruffy dogs and the latest gadgets. His favorite expression was "Give me the roses while I can still smell them," and his optimism buoyed him through life like water wings on the Dead Sea.

He took fairly good care of himself, other than putting on a few too many pounds in his 60s. For most of the 40-plus years he and my mother were together, he left the biological maintenance work up to her. And oh, did she take that job seriously! For as long as I can remember, she believed in the life-giving power of green vegetables, fresh fruit and Grape-Nuts.

In his early 70s, when my dad began to complain of occasional constipation and bloating, my mother insisted that he see a doctor, who promptly dismissed the symptoms and told my father it was just a case of gas.

"You see," my father told my mother. "It's all that broccoli you've been giving me." My mother was not convinced. Neither was my husband, who was in medical school and worried that my father might have a bowel obstruction and possibly cancer. He brought my father an at-home test to detect blood in his stool. The results came back negative.

"You see," my father said. "Nothing's wrong." But over who-knows-how-many months, we watched this normally sweet-natured man grow irritable. His ruddy complexion took on a gray pallor. By the time his doctor ordered a barium enema, it was too late.

I was at work in October 1986 when my husband called. "I've got bad news," he said, and I felt the world crash down on me.

The test results showed a tumor the size of a grapefruit in his colon. After the surgeon removed it, my father thanked him for saving his life. He didn't want to know the truth, that the cancer had already invaded his major organs.

"Tell me something bright, happy and intelligent" was another of his signature lines. Without lying, the only option was, "I love you, Daddy. Can I get you some chocolate ice cream?"

I was 33, with a 2-year-old daughter and five months' pregnant with my son. My mother didn't drive, so that fall and winter as my father wasted away, shrinking from a huggable 190 pounds down to a skeletal 140, I shuttled between our apartment in New York and my parents' house an hour's drive away in the suburbs. We brought a hospital bed into the living room, where he used to play the soundtrack from "Camelot" and lead my mother in a waltz across the braided rug.

My brother flew up from Florida and stayed for a week. My sister, who also was pregnant, drove from Washington to visit several times. When her daughter was born in February, she was named after my father's mother. He smiled wanly at the news but was too ill to cuddle his new granddaughter.

The tumors were irritating his diaphragm, which gave him an endless case of hiccups. The smell of food cooking nauseated him. Any noise got on his nerves. He would get cravings for formerly forbidden foods that had been too fattening or too salty - Mars bars and chicken chop suey - but after one bite, he would lose his appetite.

We were all there the morning he died: March 28, 1987. Three days later, I went into labor. Holding my newborn son, I felt as if my father and the baby had crossed souls like two ships in the murky night. I was angry, we all were, that a disease so preventable had been allowed to fester and rob us of a man so good and sweet.

He was partly to blame for avoiding the truth that he must have known but did not want to believe. In the 1980s, colon-cancer screening was not yet a middle-age rite of passage. Doctors did not routinely send their patients off for colonoscopies, with or without symptoms as ominous as my father's.

In spring and summer 2000, after Katie Couric underwent the procedure on TV to raise public awareness about the insidious and preventable nature of colon cancer, one study reported a 20 percent increase in patients' seeking the test.

Thanks to my father, I was ahead of that curve.

I had my first in 1998, when I turned 45.

"The prep is the worst part," my doctor said when he gave me the prescription. "But it's not really that bad." I should have known. The same way they always tell you "little pinch" before they stab you with a hypodermic needle.

But like my father, I'm an optimistic sort. Pouring the "Go Lightly" elixir into a glass, I told myself the name seemed so ethereal - I was in for a treat. As if little laxative dancers would be pirouetting into my gut and go slip-sliding away.

A half-glass into the gallons I had to swallow, I gagged. It tasted like Country Time Lemonade with an Atlantic Ocean chaser. I wondered if the sadists who invented this potion had ever tasted the stuff. If they had, you have to wonder if, when they were children, they pulled the legs off spiders and skinned frogs alive.

The upside of the revolting drink is that the diarrhea it inspires seems like a lark in comparison. Stomach cramps? Not bad. Running to the toilet? A welcome distraction. The timing leaves a lot to be desired. Gastroenterologists like to start their day early, so they have you prep overnight and arrive fresh and clean in the morning.

Which means you've been up most of the night in the bathroom.

The upside of this is that when they give you the lovely drugs to knock you out, you feel so grateful for the peaceful, if brief, sleep. I am needle-phobic, and yet I was so exhausted that when the nurse told me, "Just a little pinch," I told her, "Just give me what you've got." I don't remember anything after that, except waking up and asking if I could stay unconscious a little longer.

People say they're too embarrassed to ever let a doctor look up their butt.

Male people, mostly.

Any woman who has given birth is so beyond that sort of modesty. She's already been stripped, poked, prodded and sewn. And the discomfort? What do you think feels worse? Having a skinny scope stuck up inside you while you're sleeping or having a 7-pound baby wriggle out of you when you're wide awake?

The prep, however, is on a par with morning sickness.

Which is why, five years later, when I was supposed to schedule my next colonoscopy, I put it off. I read articles saying that since my last one had found nothing ominous lurking, I could safely wait a little longer. But in 2005, I let my doctor convince me. Besides, she said, there's a new preparation. You can take these pills.

Ah. Pills.

I'm not so good with pills, either. When I take antibiotics, I have to bury them in a spoonful of ice cream to get them down my throat. Still, pills had to be better than the alternative.

They were. Marginally.

The problem with the pills is that they are more like hockey pucks than aspirin. And even when you gulp them down so you don't taste them, the salt creeps back up into your throat.

By the last batch, I was gagging again. Cursing my fate.

The next morning, the anesthesiologist gave me my reward. And when I awoke, I looked up into the gastroenterologist's smiling face. "See that?" She showed me a picture of a rosy netherland tunnel. "Perfect."

Now five more years have passed. Last week, I went for my annual physical. I couldn't remember my last colonoscopy and that was a bad sign.

"You're due," my doctor said after flipping through my records.

"Already?"

"Sorry."

It's just a figure of speech.

The true regret comes from pretending everything will be fine. So in my father's memory, and for the sake of my children and my husband, I will go through this again. I hear Gatorade and Miralax is the new "it" drink.

And this time, when it's over, I think I'll go out for dinner - order chicken chop suey with a Mars bar for dessert.

Contact staff writer Melissa Dribben at 215-854-2590 or mdribben@phillynews.com.