One of Many Tests: Age: 8/9

Every time I went to Children's Hospital I was scared to death. On more than one occasion my routine check ups gave way to invasive, though necessary testing, often on the same day. Ah, if only stomach and intestines were as easily accessible as say, knees or teeth. Instead they're smack dab in the middle of your body with only two natural ways of getting in. Blech.

I think my earliest memory of "test terror" was when I was first being diagnosed with Crohn's--somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade. I was scheduled to have my GI tract checked out and I was going to be knocked out for it--this is as much as I knew. I didn't know the details of what was to happen, I guess I didn't care too much as long as I was going to be asleep. Being a child, I didn't know what was going on, or what questions to ask. I think my parents felt like this in a way too. I'm sure they were scared about all the mysteries that were going on inside my body especially before diagnosis; they also didn't really know the details of what was to come either. It was new to all of us.

I remember bits and pieces of my first Colonoscopy. I lay nervously on the gurney as they prepped me for an IV. I cringed at the prick of the needle. (Doctors have always had a very tough time finding my veins since I was little. They are small and really don't stick out at all. Sometimes it takes three or four tries just to draw blood from me even as an adult. Still makes me pretty woozy.) Once the IV was in, they gave me medicine to relax. Soon I was wheeled through through many sets of double doors and into the halls where other patients lay in their hospital beds, newly bandaged from surgeries and doped up into a calm stupor. My final stop was a science fiction looking exam room with all kinds of monitors and gadgets rigged up to hospital trees. They gave me a gas mask and asked me to count backwards from ten. They said that people usually don't make it past seven. I worried what would happen if I made it down to two. Soon there would be no numbers left besides negatives, would they start anyway? But soon, as to be expected, the room started to become foggy and the anesthesiologist who was looking down at me from over the side of my hospital bed started to disappear until I was asleep.

Now, I don't know how long they were working on me by this point, but in the middle of the procedure, I woke up. I woke up while under anesthesia. Holy crap. I was confused and in pain and started screaming. I vaguely remember the doctors scrambling around in their shower caps and scrubs and saying something like, "give her some more!" (I found out later that I was one of the youngest, if not the youngest person at that hospital to get a Colonoscopy and that they weren't sure how much anesthesia was required for someone so little.) I fell asleep quickly after that incident but I never forgot it like you're supposed to.