5 Reasons to Avoid a DIY Colonoscopy
There is a moment in every American cheapskate’s life when the hospital bill arrives and his eye begins twitching.
He looks at the deductible. He looks at the garage. He thinks, “How hard could it be?”
The answer is: harder than installing a transmission while drunk, and considerably less photogenic.
A colonoscopy sounds simple until you remember the camera has to go somewhere a flashlight has never been welcome.
Putting a tube up your own back porch is, charitably, the worst home improvement project in recorded history. The phrase “TikTok challenge” does not begin to cover it.
That bar was already buried somewhere underground next to your dignity.
The 5 reasons to avoid a DIY colonoscopy below were compiled at the desperate request of every gastroenterologist in North America.
1. Your Bathroom Has Never Passed an Inspection
The bathroom where a man performs his own colonoscopy is the same bathroom where he keeps a dying spider plant and a bottle of cologne from 2009.
Hospital operating rooms are scrubbed by professionals who treat a stray fingerprint like a war crime.
Your shower has visible mold you have been calling “character” since the Obama administration.
The ceiling fan does not work. It has not worked in years. The air in there is roughly 70% you and 30% regret.
A surgeon needs ten thousand lumens of overhead light.
You have one bulb shaped like a flame because Home Depot was out of regular bulbs and you panicked at the register.
That bulb flickers every time the dishwasher runs.
The dishwasher has been running for three hours because nobody loaded it correctly. You do not have time to deal with that now. You are about to commit a misdemeanor in your own house.
2. Home Depot Does Not Carry Endoscopes
The Roto-Rooter aisle is not a substitute for a board-certified gastroenterologist, no matter how confidently you walk down it.
A real endoscope is a fiber-optic surgical instrument that costs more than your truck.
It is operated by people who attended school for fourteen years and still owe most of that money to a federal loan officer named Brenda.
Your version is a thirty-foot drain snake from Harbor Freight.
And a flashlight you stole from a Best Western in Reno in 2017.
That snake has visible teeth marks. Your son used it to fish a Hot Wheels car out of the toilet last spring.
That was already the worst use of the tool, until precisely this afternoon.
You can wipe it down with Purell, and you can duct-tape a GoPro to one end. Neither of those things makes a drain snake a medical instrument.
The seventeen-year-old who rang you up is telling this story to his coworkers right now. He will retell it at Thanksgiving for the rest of his natural life.
3. Bourbon Is Not Anesthesia
Real anesthesia is administered by a man named Dr. Steve who carries a malpractice policy roughly the size of Liechtenstein.
Your version is a pull off a handle of Evan Williams and a YouTube video titled “How to Pass Out on Command (Beginner Friendly).”
The difference becomes obvious around shot four.
You will be sobbing about your father on a tarp with a drain snake nearby and a Steely Dan album playing for reasons no one in the room can explain.
Propofol takes you down in thirty seconds with no memory of the event. Bourbon takes you down in two hours and saves every memory in 4K Dolby Atmos.
The dog is watching all of this. He has not blinked in nine minutes.
He is going to need a therapist of his own. You absolutely cannot afford that on top of everything else.
4. No Insurance Plan Has Ever Approved “Recreational Spelunking”
Your HSA card was built for prescriptions and the occasional orthopedic clog the IRS considers medical if you squint. It was not built for this.
It was not built for a receipt that includes one drain snake, one tarp, one Costco-size jug of Astroglide, and a thirty-rack of Coors Light, all rung up at a Walmart in Tulsa.
The Aetna rep puts you on hold.
She will escalate you to a supervisor whose entire department exists for claims that “require legal review.”
The supervisor’s job is technically to not laugh on the phone, which she will save for the parking lot afterward when she tells her husband the whole story over dinner, possibly with reenactments.
The IRS will not call any of this a medical expense.
They will instead invite you to a meeting they are generously calling a “conversation.”
That meeting will involve four people in suits. One of them is taking notes for the federal record.
5. The Footage Will Outlive You
Every modern phone backs up every video to a cloud you do not understand and absolutely do not control.
The forty-seven-minute clip titled “test_FINAL_v3.mov” syncs to the family iPad before you can locate your pants.
Your mother-in-law will discover it during the Christmas slideshow.
She was just looking for photos of the grandkids. She found something else. The marriage ends that same afternoon.
Your wife will file annulment papers her divorce attorney describes as “the cleanest case of my career.”
The clip will then leak to a subreddit you cannot say out loud at Thanksgiving.
Therapy is six hundred dollars an hour in this economy.
Your children will need it until they are forty. Their children will need it preventatively from the womb.
The cloud is forever. The cloud has no shame. The cloud has already shared the file with a contact you do not remember adding to your phone in 2014.
Just Make the Damn Appointment
The actual procedure costs whatever your deductible is, plus a Jell-O cup in recovery and a ride home from someone who loves you slightly more than they should.
The doctor has performed this thousands of times.
The camera is sterile and the propofol works on contact. The gown they hand you fits like a guilty conscience.
The only person who sees the inside of you is a board-certified professional.
That professional is legally not allowed to laugh until you have left the building.
Schedule the appointment. Drink the prep that is going to turn your bathroom into a crime scene anyway. Bring a Gatorade for the ride home.
Your colon, your spouse, your dog, and the entire IT department at the Apple Store will thank you.
