Way back in January, I called the gastroenterology department of the clinic next door to my home and in childish Czech managed arranged a colonoscopy. We settled on May 26. I hung up the phone satisfied with my linguistic victory and slapped the referral up on the fridge under a Guinness magnet and went about my day.

I then went about my day quite normally, as if I had not just arranged for a group of strangers to navigate a long scope up my ass. For three and a half months that referral and that word ‘colonoscopy’ was a theory, a procedure of the future, a word that evinced a solid level of responsibility for a man entering his fifties. Since I turned fifty, I haven’t felt much different, as if I was still in my forties but someone had accidentally let me into a club I didn’t belong to.

But now with the word ‘colonoscopy’ I felt that I had convincingly entered that demographic. I could drop it into conversations like the older folks I have known. ‘Nah, can’t do it that week, I’ve got my colonoscopy.’ It’s just what you say. It’s routine. You’re fifty. You have a medical responsibility. But in the subtitle of everyday language, you are telling someone ‘Sorry. On the morning of May 26, someone is going to lube me up and stick at least one medical instrument up my ass. And that is why I can’t play Laser Tag that day.’

What you leave out to everyone, except for your close friends, live-in partner, pets, and those who have been there before, is what you have to do on May 25.

On May 6, I arrive at the department for the procedure’s prep meeting. The nurse explains to me there is a diet for 5 days beforehand (I didn’t know this) and then she sends me a prescription for the laxatives which will give the doctors ‘the clearest possible image of my colon’. Surely you can do the math here. To get a clear image of a lower GI tract, you need to clean it out. Totally. And what better to do that job than Clensia?

On my way out of the clinic I pop into the pharmacy and get my laxatives. They come in a white box with black lettering. The biggest word by far on this box is Clensia. The name sort of says it all. Though it leaves out ‘Clensia out until you are a weeping puddle of sadness’. The box contains 8 sacks of laxative (4 big, 4 small), but feels as though it’s carrying a few hefty novellas. I’d write that the pharmacist gives me a sympathetic look, but that would be a boldfaced lie. She has given out far worse for far worse to far unhappier people. She cares very little about my rump and its future.

Much like my referral, the box of Clensia sits and waits on a shelf, watching me in its theoretical usefulness for around two weeks. The days inch closer and closer until I have to read the instructions.

Oh, I have some idea of what this entails. You drink a powerful laxative concoction, which works its magic, shocking your body into action and submission all at once, and everything that ever existed in your body that isn’t bolted down comes flying out at the speed of sound. I make a simple plan. Obviously, I’m not leaving home. I have a lot of work to do. Burke will be on dog-walking duty for the day. I plan to sit at my desk and work, and when the need ‘arises’ I will head the twenty or so feet to the bathroom – which I have outfitted with my spare set of reading glasses and the book I’m currently reading. It’s all set. It won’t be so bad.  

This sentence’s job should be a hyperbolic description of how wrong ‘it won’t be so bad’ was. My powers of exaggeration, however, fail me. The concoction doesn’t so much do ‘magic’ in my system as it becomes fed-after-midnight-gremlins who then go to town on my colon like it’s Randy Peltzer’s kitchen. Oh, medical professionals also leave out the part where all that stuff flying out of your body takes with it any remaining electrolytes, any residual optimism left over from your youth, and your will to live. By mid-afternoon, I have counted the steps from my desk to the bathroom – fifteen. An hour later, I trade in my pants for a big towel. There’s no point in putting pants back on when they’re just going to be removed in a panicked state. By late-afternoon, I stop sitting down to work. Instead, I opt to stand at the kitchen counter, which is ten steps from the bathroom. Trust me, those five steps matter. I stand and do my work. In no pants. Crying.

I should stop complaining. Medical advancements and technology have come a long way in making fifty-year-olds in 2025 as healthy and vital as thirty-five-year-olds in 1985. They can replace our old parts like knees and hips. They have found ways to make sure we live longer and with a much better quality of life. And one of the big reasons for that is the colonoscopy.

The word ‘colonoscopy’ has become such a part of our lexicon that it’s maybe surprising to realize that it’s only been part of our mainstream medical culture since 1997. It became more common practice only in the early-mid-2000s. And the effects are undeniable. Between 1970 and 2020 there was a 50% drop in colorectal cancer deaths – basically due to the colonoscopy as a screening process.

Surely there are untold millions among the previous generations who would have happily dealt with a day of aggressive pooping before getting a scope up their rear had it prevented what was to come. While this insight makes sense to me now, post-procedure, it lacks the intended impact late in my prep day, as I have become a moaning, pantless fool who is sitting on the toilet for the thirtieth or so time that day.  

My procedure is at 7 am. I am brought in quickly, given colonoscopy pants (they are light and have, as you may guess, an easy-access gap in the rear. By the time I am pulling my knees to my chest and the nurse is sedating me, I am ready for whatever comes. And as I slip off into a definitely-could-be-deeper state of unawareness, I wonder if that’s a subsidiary goal of the prep day: to create a misery so profound that the misery that comes later is not as miserable.      

Well, at least I’ll have something to bring up to my 50-year-old friends.

I’m amazed by people who watch new things on TV every day. Someone who has a full day of exhausting work, navigates the maelstroms of daily interactions with other humans and then goes home and plops on a movie they’ve never seen or a show that you just want to try out. Wow.

My particular brand of mental exhaustion demands a period of attentive-inattentiveness in the evening. I work hard all day, reading, writing, editing, teaching, dealing with all the minutia in between and the last thing I need at home is new. I want old news. I want a show I have seen 81,293 times. I want a show whose jokes I know so well, I can skip them with precision if I want and still not miss the call back that comes 30 seconds after it. What this old show is depends on whim and mood. I go through phases. Brooklyn 99. 30 Rock. Friends. Cheers. Frasier. Do I feel like the 1990s? How about a little 1980s?

This isn’t to say that I sit and watch these shows. They are normally on in the background like light versions of light pop songs in the elevator. I usually read or do the little bits of work that couldn’t get attended to during the day. Burke usually goes along with whatever as she usually winds down her night working or playing on her phone and finding massively depressing news items to tell me about right before bed. That, or who Cher is dating or why we don’t like Susan Sarandon anymore. Or why Madonna wears gloves. I know it all. It gets through.

I understand that this habit makes me smack dab in the middle of the road normal. Everyone does it (except for those psychos who watch new stuff). And I have read about why people do this and I tick every single solitary box. Craving familiarity, fulfilling my emotional needs, the Mister Rogers effect, the Conjuring effect, and nostalgia therapy. All there for me. I’m not special.

Mid-April. It was a nice, quiet Tuesday evening, or some day that’s innocuous like a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday, but not tranquil like a Thursday or a Friday. I was in my armchair and I was reading. The TV was on in the background. We had eaten, so there was nothing to look forward to for the rest of the day, except maybe a yogurt. My phone buzzed and, being a resident of the 21^st century, I dropped my book instantly to find out who was contacting me.

My sister. I staved off the disappointment. I mean, I love my sister, but there could always be more exciting correspondents. The message was this: Hey.

‘Hey’ can mean a lot of things. It already meant a lot of things back when we spoke to each other in person with our mouths. It could be a greeting, a warning, a threat, a complaint. Nowadays, removing intonation, facial cues, and the 71,292 emoticons that usually accompany one of my sister’s messages, and it could be anything from remonstration to greeting to precursor to ‘I have some bad news. Are you there?’

And I was there. But I wasn’t sure if I was going to be there. Answering a message can make or break your day. It can lead to good information, a fun chat, information you didn’t want on an innocuous Tuesday or, worst of all, tasks you didn’t want to undertake. I had a few moments and considered my options. I plopped my phone in my lap and vaguely hoped for another vibrating text from someone more exciting.

This sister and I had not had any recent fights. So, ‘Hey’ was unlikely to be a ‘Hey, we need to clear the air here.’ This sister lives at home. Were there a problem with one of my parents she would likely be the spreader of that news. This could potentially be, ‘Hey, I have to tell you something.’ And this sister will, on occasion, just say hello and she can be a drop tone deaf. So it was possible that ‘Hey’ was simply ‘Hey.’ But could she want something else? I wasn’t sure. In a moment of familial loyalty that I’d kick myself for two weeks later, I wrote back.

‘Hey.’

The floodgates opened.

The gist. My mother had decided – along with the higherups at her work – that it was time for her to retire. This was a big decision. My mom has been working at the same company for almost three decades and, to put it in patently understatement terms, she loves her job. She is, until this Friday, a beloved and loyal employee. Moreover, the love that she has for this job and her colleagues and bosses is returned in spades by those bosses and colleagues. At the age of around fifty, my mom got the job of her dreams (organizing things for other people) and never looked back.

The problem. My sister’s ‘Hey’ was followed by ‘…can I ask you to do something?’ My mom’s bosses were throwing her a retirement party. They thought a neato thing to do would be to get her beloved family members – aka, those who’d ruined her uterus and were thus guilted into doing pretty much whatever she asked for the rest of her life – to record congratulatory videos. These videos were to be watched during the retirement party. So, not only did we have to record videos – closeups of our faces while speaking – but we were going to be watched by a party full of people we didn’t know holding paper plates with half-eaten slices of pound cake with vanilla icing up to their lips and asking their neighbor through plastic forks ‘who’s this again?’

That was ‘Hey.’

It’s a few minutes before 8 am and I wake up in a slight haze. It’s the haze of waking up still tipsy in a different city and in a hotel room you don’t recognize. I sit up. Oh, right…we’re in Munich. I get up and get dressed.

Burke and I travel well together. This is mainly because we both have a good idea of when walking around and looking at old stuff should transition into sitting down and sampling local delicacies and whatever the local version of Becherovka happens to be. Being in tune with your travel partner in this way is incredibly important. If you disagree, then you have yet to be on a trip with a person whose ideas of fun on a weekend trip differ from yours. The sweet innocent weekend trip has ended more than one relationship. It’s almost certainly ended more than one friendship. And it’s probably led to a murder or two. So, we’re lucky we agree on most points.

We have traditions too. One of them is that in the morning, Burke sleeps the sleep of a fairytale princess who’s been cursed by a witch, while I haul my hungover ass around our neighborhood to find us baked goods and some coffee. And it is such a quest for which I am currently pulling on my pants. After purposely forgetting to brush my teeth, I step out the door to find out what morning wares our neighborhood in Munich pitches.

The evening before, we noticed a place called Boogie Donuts, which seems right in line with what I’d like to destroy my waistline with on this weekend trip. I make my way through quiet – too quiet streets to where the donut place is. I visited Austria a month or so ago with my brother and undertook the same morning task. The result couldn’t have been better. The Austrians called me forth to their bakeries, explained their strangely-just-out-of-reach-linguistically cakes and pastries, congratulated me on the Eagles’ Superbowl victory, gave me a cake for free, and sent me home. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for something similar.

I first come across a local shop. There’s bread in the windows. It’s colorful inside and I see men inside working in yellow uniforms and the little hats of those ordered to keep their hair out of food. As I need toothpaste and maybe some juice, this will be perfect. I present myself at the entrance and step inside. One of the men lets off a string of (I suppose it was) German. He is wearing a smile of pure pleasure, as if he’s telling me I’ve just had a healthy child or that my mortgage application was just approved. I studied German in high school and hoped some of the old words and phrases (Das ist ein blauer Bleistift and Ich habe ein kleines Schlafzimmer) might come in handy. It doesn’t. To the chagrin of thousands of American second language students, language describing pencils and bedrooms rarely come into play while ordering breakfast.

Instead, I mutter that I don’t speak German. The man, no change to his face, switches instantly. He informs me, with the same genuine smile, that they open at 8 am. We both take that opportunity to look at the digital clock on the wall and watch 7:58 change to 7:59. I look back at him. With the (now creepy) smile, he tells me ‘just a few minutes.’ I take my leave for donuts. On the block and a half walk to the donut places it occurs to me that when a local shop isn’t open at 8, a donut shop isn’t going to open til 9.