I don't know how I messed that up. I made my colonoscopy appointment specifically on what I thought was GTA day. And I was giggling as I did it, planning to combine a legal sick day from work with the childlike wonder of Grand Theft Auto. I guess I got "week of 4/28" confused with "4/28" as I scheduled my scoping, and I never circled back to double-check myself. So all this time I've been waiting for 4/28, when a simple internet search shows that everybody else has been stoked for 4/29 as far back as January.

The worst part is that I had to be corrected by the monkey at Toys R Us. The same chimp who laughed when I inquired about No More Heroes and speculated that they would never get that game in stock, and by the way, it's been in stock for weeks. How embarrassing.

I even had my mom along with me (she was my designated driver for the colonoscopy), so she could vouch for my age in case I was carded!

To make matters worse, I couldn't even pick up Mario Kart Wii, because I have a coupon for $10 off $100. For the sake of $10, I'm buying both games at the same time. Tomorrow. Probably on my lunch break.

So that first ass-ramming was largely of my own design. The second one was far less painful.

I'm on the young end for a colonoscopy, but there is a family history of problems in that area, so it was a wise thing to do. The worst part was drinking the bowel irrigation fluid the day before. Not being able to eat anything for a day was a drag, but not as bad as I thought.

It took the nurse several times to stick me for the IV, because my veins kept rolling away from the needle. That was hilarious. I got to see the ass-camera itself prior to insertion, but the twilight anesthetic knocked me out cold, so I didn't get any cool intestinal views. I forgot to ask if they record that stuff; I'll mention it at my follow-up. I did not get to consciously experience any of the procedure. Not that I wanted to be awake for "the nozzle," but I'm usually madly curious about these sorts of things. As I told the nurse while she attached heart and lung monitors to me, I'm very interested in what's about to happen, I just wish I wasn't the guy on the table.

The doctor found and removed one polyp, which isn't a big deal because only 1% of intestinal polyps become cancerous.

Coming out of the anesthetic was pretty awesome. The first thing I heard was the nurse telling me I should fart. Not in those terms, of course. She used that genteel medical talk, "You probably have air in your system, so you should let it out or it will hurt." So, still half-asleep, I passed the barking spiders... and then the nurse moved and I saw my mom sitting beside me.

As I changed from the hospital gown to my street clothes, I softly sung most of "Still Alive." Not as any kind of editorial comment on medical procedures, but because I wanted to challenge my foggy mind to remember something. And when you're coming out of anesthetic, sitting behind a curtain in a hospital ward and singing doesn't strike you as being particularly weird.

On the way home we stopped for french fries, my first real food in about thirty hours. I was lucid enough that if I had a compelling reason to stay awake, I could have. But without GTAIV and Mario Kart, it hardly seemed worth it. So I went to bed.