Butt Stuff

There is a time in all of our lives when we will have to go to the doctor, make polite small talk, and then get a camera shoved into the south end of our bodies for 30 minutes while the inner workings of our poop chute get examined. This is known as a colonoscopy and for most people, this procedure will have to be performed every ten years or so once they hit the ripe old age of 50. It is reasonable to expect that by the time teenagers enter high school, they would have a general idea about what a colonoscopy is, right? For one high school senior, though, this wasn’t true. At all.

At the age of 18, Amanda B. believed that during a colonoscopy, the doctors put a camera down your throat. That’s right. Despite the fact that the word colon is explicitly in the name, she thought the camera was shoved INTO YOUR GULLET to take a little peak at the inside of the pharynx and maybe your stomach if they feel like it. Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this one. 

A Little Look Inside…

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, a colonoscopy is “a medical examination of the colon (= the lower part of the tube that take solid waste out of your body).” To further dive into the unfortunate medical procedure that is a colonoscopy, the procedure begins when the doctor a long, tubular instrument into the rectum of the patient that captures and transmits imagery of the inside of the colon. As the doctor goes deeper, the colonoscope (this is the tube described before and, once again, it as the word COLON in it) reaches into the large intestine. The goal of this procedure is to check for any abnormalities, make sure there is no cancer developing, and sometimes, it’s even to figure out why someone is having explosive diarrhea.

Furthermore, a colonoscopy is further away from putting a little camera down your throat than we are from the Andromeda Galaxy (that’s 2,537,000 light years away, guys. If it hypothetically takes a modern space shuttle 37,200 Earth years to travel a single light year, that means it would take 943,764,000,000 years to get to that galaxy. C’mon, Amanda).

33 Feet Under

Now, let’s just say that hypothetically, Amanda was on the right track and there were procedures where they put a camera down your throat to take a look at your colon. All of the intestines, organs, and ickiness that the camera would have to travel through to get from your mouth to your tush totals up to 33 feet. So that would mean a lot of staff would have to be on hand to hold a 35 foot long tube off of the ground to slowly, carefully stick it in you. Let’s say they put one person every three feet of tubing or so to keep it off of the hospital floor. Rounding up, that’s twelve people. Likely, these people would be nursing aids, the lowest paid staff member in the hospital, making $15 an hour. Excluding the doctor who needs to be there, that means it would cost an extra $100 dollars and a hell of a lot more tubing to perform Amanda’s vision of a colonoscopy. Do you know how many chicken nuggets you could buy with that money? 445 chicken nuggets. Is it worth it? 

Conclusion

Amanda B.’s vision that a colonoscopy is performed by putting a camera down the patients throat is largely, incredibly incorrect. Not only is the camera inserted into your butt, the complete opposite end of the body, if it were to be inserted at the mouth, it would take 33 feet of tubing and cost 445 chicken nuggets. Sorry, Amanda. You’re wrong. Better luck next time.