The lighter side of colonoscopy??

About a year ago ,when I was still in boarding school, the school doctor after prescribing just about every medicine he knew that would cure a bad stomach ,(none of which worked) finally came to the conclusion that I was suffering from IBS. For those of you who don’t know, IBS stands for irritable bowels syndrome. What that basically means is that nervousness is going to do more damage than just give you a sweaty forehead. Anyway, the doctor suggested I get a laparoscopy or a colonoscopy test or something done on me just to make sure. “Doesn’t that have something to do with a camera?” I asked him. With a sympathetic smile, he said it did.

Now one of the only things good about getting a camera shoved up your behind is that you get a week off school(which was a big deal back at the boarding school), not that you need that many days though. You see the man who was in charge of giving me permission to leave school for medical reasons and things, I think had no idea what a colonoscopy meant. I guess he thought it was something very sophisticated and dangerous judging by the name (it did sound more complicated than a viral infection or something, you’ve got to admit) and without even asking me how many days I needed suggested that I take a week off. The thing is I really needed just two days, but I wasn’t that much of a saint and turn that down you see.

I spent an entire morning of drinking twenty litres of the most disgusting tasting (even after mixing some lemon flavored tang in it) laxative ever subscribed, by a doctor who made me buy it from him for ten times its real price. After answering natures call (more like “scream” considering it’s the ‘big job’ she was calling for) every five minutes, at the end of everything I felt skinny. Something I hadn’t felt in nine years.

For someone who had never had tubes shoved around his body, I was more than just terrified. And the hospital only just made things worse. I mean, its depressing enough when you have got a hundred other sick people around you, but just to make things a little worse, they make you sit around for an hour with nothing to do but think about the pain and suffering that lay ahead. I then tried looking at the brighter side of it all: other than the fact that this might just find out what was wrong with me, I remembered my friend telling me that the colonoscopy camera in his hospital was worth a crore, while it actually cost only around five lakhs (yes, I checked it up on the internet) but still, that got me pretty excited. I mean, how many people have had a crore’s worth of something inside their body right? Just then a nurse came up to me and asked wether I had visited the toilet at least twenty times. I tried to think but I kept losing count, so I finally gave up and said that I did. She went back into the colonoscopy theater or whatever it was called before I could ask her how much longer I had to wait, so I followed her into the dreadful place. And as I entered, I saw a nurse pushing a trolley on which there was a long black and shiny tube with a glass on one end. “Hmm..i wonder what that….HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!” I suddenly realized what it was. I very calmly walked back to the waiting room (since I didn’t want to attract any attention) and told my mother “No way mom. no way..have you seen the size of that thing?” “Honey its either that or you have to go the bathroom every time you go on a date, or get pulled over by a cop, or even see a cop and think he’s going to pull you over.” I had to give in.

The two nurses in charge of me were very nice people. It would have been even nicer if they were all young and pretty, but one can’t have it all I guess. They gave me an injection of something that I hoped was anesthesia so that I could just sleep through the whole thing and let the doctor do his thing and all. I didn’t fall asleep through the process though, but in the end, it really wasn’t that bad actually. I mean how many people get to have something that costs as much as a Ferrari inside them, as well as watch their interstines live on television right? I walked back out that door with a wide grin on my face to show the people outside that it wasn’t going to be as bas as they thought. The next thing I remember, I was on a bed looking up at the ceiling. Great!! The friggin anesthesia worked after everything was over.

My attempt at philosophy..and why i eventually gave it up

A chicken can be looked at by a person as anything ranging from a living thing having a complex nervous system, to an ingredient for soup for his/her cold. Perception is something that can either be the way a person chooses to look at or think of something or just involuntarily understands that something in a particular way.In other words, it is extremely subjective. Perception is determined by a variety of factors that range from society and its norms, individual emotions, the amount of knowledge one posses on a particular subject, the period of time in history one is living in and other things that I cant really think of. Each factor contributes quite significantly to ones perception of things in general.
An example could be made of a car enthusiast who out of sheer passion(and a lot of money), buys himself a nice big Land Rover. His perception of it would probably be a beautiful machine that is capable of giving him immense levels of pleasure and satisfaction( and probably lots of women too) when driven around. But a Green-Peace activist could come along and rip the car’s wind-shield wipers off and let the air out of the tires out of frustration because all he can perceive, or at least chooses to perceive of it would be a waste of precious fuel and a contributor to global warming. It’s beauty and performance would not really interest him. And even if he secretly did like it, he couldn’t let his other green peace buddies know and so he would choose to keep the melting ice-caps higher up his list of priorities. And if a person came across the same car around fifty years from now, taking into consideration the fact that it did not already let the Earth get flooded, it would symbolise a relic of the past. It could still be admired for its beauty but not in the same way it was fifty years ago. It could be compared to the way the world admires Shakespeare’s work today, where one usually tends to look at it as something philosophical and deep with obscure ironical statements that Shakespeare probably did not notice himself. Whereas the audience who watched the plays in Shakespeare’s time only watched it for entertainment’s sake and did not bother to “appreciate” the depth of each character and notice the obscure ironies that were so intricately woven into the plot (written intentionally, or just turned out to be a matter of mere coincidence)
And so, even if a chicken is thought of as nothing but an ingredient for soup by the entire world, it could not be considered as a completely uniform perception since that would only be looking at the surface of things. Each person could in fact have in mind a different way of cooking it and then later a different way of serving it and so on. Only when every living human-being on Earth somehow miraculously posses the same brain patterns or something of the sort… and therefore the same thought process along with exactly the same conditions around him/her with nothing to change his/her way of thinking can there be a uniform perceptions of things. And so the point being…that perception…is.. about beauty lying in the eyes of the beholder or something like that...
And once I realized that all of that related in no way to my life in general and did not even slightly make me look at things in a different way( assuming that’s what philosophy is supposed to make you do)…I gave up on trying to think philosophically..