Don’t delve too deeply on colonoscopy issue

A dear young friend just sent me this anguished e-mail: “The woman who sits next to me at work keeps on telling me about her colonoscopy. What can you do, besides nodding sympathetically and going, ‘Mmm hmm, I bet that hurt?’ “

Oh, you mean, what can you do besides putting your head on your desk and quietly sobbing?

Actually, this is an intriguing question of office etiquette. Some people would have taken it as a mere rhetorical question. Yet, I, Mr. Office Manners, considered it an intellectual challenge. What do you say to people who insist on doing a play-by-play, complete with sound effects, of their colonoscopies?

Well, I suggest you begin with the standard colonoscopy talking points, the time-honored clichés that have served millions of people well in gastrointestinal small talk.

No. 1 on the list: “You know, it’s not the procedure itself that’s so bad. It’s the preparation.”

This should be safe territory, since everybody who has endured this particular test agrees that the purgative part of the process resembles purgatory.

However, I must warn you: Certain people – and my friend’s co-worker sounds like one – may see this as an invitation to launch into horrifying details about her laxative schedule; her increasingly dramatic visits to the old privy; and her own capacity for expurgative endurance. You’ll soon be wishing she’d revert back to the topic of benign polyps.

The second most common line of colon-versation is: “Weren’t you just starving when it was all over? After all of that fasting?”

This is usually safe enough, too, since everybody emerges from the procedure hungry. However, this, too, has its dangers. Certain kinds of food-centric persons are convinced that the real problem with a colonoscopy is not that a video camera is inserted into their person, but that they have to skip three meals.

Let’s call us, I mean them, “epicures,” since “pigs” sounds so harsh.

Anyway, for some of us, taking even one lunch away is traumatic. Fasting for an entire day makes us feel as if we are suffering on the same scale as Darfur refugees.

So we will take this as a cue to whine pitifully about our Gandhi-like deprivations, our subsequent food cravings and our triumphant post-procedure pigout with a Papa Joe’s burger.

Hmm. Maybe this is not such a smart conversational strategy.

In search of an alternative, I went directly to a trained authority: a radiologist. He suggested the following expert conversational gambits to use when someone goes on about their colonoscopy:

“Wow. That sounds interesting. Can I watch the video?”

“Wow. That sounds interesting. What did they find in there? Good air or bad air?” (This apparently is a radiology in-joke.)

Well, I don’t know. When I tried some of these ideas out on my beleaguered e-mail friend, she did not seem impressed.

In fact, she told me she had come up with her own perfect reply, which she plans to employ next time:

“That’s it. I quit.”

This will be followed by the sound of a door slamming, followed by the sound of her office-mate rattling on, undaunted, about the size of her polyp.