Until last week, I’d never heard of the Broomway. Now I long to walk it.
The Broomway is a paradox: a path through the ocean, a six-century-old walkway that disappears each day. It begins on the southeastern coast of England and heads straight out to sea, crossing about three miles of sand and mudflats until it washes up on a marshy island called, picturesquely and appropriately, Foulness.
Known as the deadliest path in Britain, its walkers have been swept away by tides, lost in thick white fog, and stuck in sucking mud when they strayed from the Broomway’s relatively stable ground. Accounts of Broomway adventures lean heavily on moonless nights and crab-nibbled corpses.
IF ONLY. But no, my prep drink didn’t make me feel like this.
Back in September 2014 I wrote about my colonoscopy. Guess what, folks? I’m deep in the “prep” once again! (People with IBD have to do these things more often than most, unfortunately.) And that means I’m not feeling up for writing much, so instead I’ll share my previous review of the pre-test experience. Thankfully, this time around I’m using a tasteless powder in good-old Gatorade to prepare, and it’s much less awful than the 2014 version. Anyway, enjoy! I know I did!
Oh, and also: Stop procrastinating and get one. I’m looking at you, over-50 and full of excuses.
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So, today I’ll be writing about my colonoscopy.
Now wait, please don’t close this page! I promise not to dig too deep…er, I mean, I won’t get too mired in…oops, well, let’s just say I’ll try not to say a whole lot about poop. My real interest right now is actually in the “bowel prep.” Specifically, why does this particular prep drink taste like bubblegum flavored vinegar with two cups of salt and a bad egg? I’ve had this test before and the prep, while icky, wasn’t as foul as this one. With some ice cubes, a slosh of ginger ale, and a straw, I could almost pretend it was a new summer drink that I wouldn’t be ordering again.
Meanwhile, what the heck is it doing in there in order to leave a person empty as a kid’s Halloween bag on November 2? (I could make a tootsie roll joke, but I won’t.)
The SUPREP kit contains two 6-oz brown bottles that look benign enough. I’m supposed to drink one in the evening and one the next morning (mixed with 10 ounces of water each time)—that doesn’t sound too bad. And then, for the next hour after I down the stuff, I’m to drink 32 ounces of water every 15 minutes, in four 8-ounce servings. There’s even a little chart on which I can mark off each one as I go. That’s so helpful!
Now, let’s talk about the “drink” itself. The label reads: sodium sulfate, potassium sulfate, and magnesium sulfate, oral solution. I want to make an observation here, based on recent experience. This is not something anyone should be taking orally, and the only thing it solves is the problem of not being nauseated. I felt so ill after drinking it that I thought maybe I should have just accepted my gut problems as a part of me I didn’t like, like my nose. It was truly that awful. Sour, bitter, sweet like fake sugar, medicinal, heavily salty. Sort of like Red Bull. And (my fault) room temperature. Undrinkable.
But in the midst of all this unpleasantness, trying to ignore the nausea, reminding myself that colonoscopies save lives and all that, I am wondering what all these sulfates are and what each one does. I want answers. Can’t help it—that’s how my brain works in a crisis.
Before I get into those details, though, let’s talk about the water requirement. I’m no whiz with numbers, but I find out quickly that 32 ounces is a lot of liquid for a petite person such as myself, and 15 minutes is a blip in time to get it all down. I usually save my roaming-the-desert thirst for roaming the desert. Plus, I’ve been on a liquid diet all day, which makes me cranky, not thirsty.
My eyeballs are floating after the first two glasses—remember, I already drank the 16-ounce prep—and suddenly the timer is going off and I realize how behind I am. (I said behind.) The second 15 minutes has started and I’m barely halfway through water round #1. Already I’m a balloon. And I’m oddly nervous. Its like having pages to go of a test and the teacher calling out “pencils down!” (We used to use pencils in school.) But failure isn’t an option: To start this test over another day is unthinkable. I keep drinking.
Meanwhile, how about those sulfates? Here’s what I find out in between visits to the WC. (And yes, this is from Wikipedia because, as you can imagine, my time at the computer is limited.) Sodium sulfate is the white salt of sulfuric acid. It is used, among other things, in making detergents, explosives, dyes, batteries, and in the paper pulping process. It also has laxative effects, though how someone at the detergent, explosive, or paper factory found that out is unclear.
Potassium sulfate is another crystalline salt mostly used in fertilizers, which makes it sound toxic, but as a nutrient, which makes it sound almost healthy. One of its roles is to help regulate water flow in the cells and leaves of plants. That seems relevant.
And finally, magnesium sulfate, another inorganic salt. It contains magnesium, sulfur, and oxygen and, like its potassium brother, it is mostly used in agriculture—as a drying agent. Maybe, then, it balances out the effects of the sodium sulfate. You find it in Epsom salt, so feel free to take a bath in it. (Apparently it makes crops grow better and can be used in the removal of splinters.)
Together, this salty chemical slurry that is clearly inedible unless you are a fern is dynamite at regulating water in order to transform and get poop out. Really, really fast. It’s like it scares it out of there. Poop, be gone! Very effective.
I’ll leave it there. (I wouldn’t want to muddy the waters.) Maybe it’s for a good cause, but the Suprep prep kit really, really ruined my day. And as a new morning approaches I look forward to a second bottle of solution, another gallon or so of water, and then the test itself—for which I will be asleep, thank the bowel gods. Good times.
On a positive note, I learned a little chemistry and, better yet, I’m back to my high school weight!
This post first appeared more than four years ago, and I wish I could tell you the state of Alzheimer’s treatment had progressed significantly since then. Mostly the change has been for the worse–baby boomers are falling victim to the disease en masse. But Alzheimer’s or no, the words of Sister Mary (see below) are fine words to live by.
For every year since 1840, life expectancy in the Western world has lengthened by three months. Many more of us can look forward to a full retirement and, in the Commonwealth countries, a letter from the Queen on our 100th birthdays. It’s worth asking, though, whether large-scale longevity is worth pursuing if more than half of us will become demented before that century mark. Continue reading →
I’m writing this to be the voice of all the people who have had this winter’s ratty cold and have not written blog posts about it. I’ve had it twice now, so aside from worrying about what that says about my fundamentals, I feel qualified to testify. I testified once before here but this time I’m serious.
Day 1: Scratchy sore throat, I had this three months
ago, I am instantly on guard. I take no
chances. I decline an invitation to come over for drinks. I take a pre-emptive antihistamine,
Day 2: Scratchier sore throat, possible increase in fatigue. I would decline drinks again but receive no invitations. I take another pre-emptive antihistamine, add an anti-inflammatory nasal spray, sleep badly.
Day 3: Continued as before, wondering whether a cold that takes this long to kick in means I’m beating it or it’s going to be a bitch. I bundle up and go the farmers’ market for the week’s food. Sleep interrupted by coughing and nose blowing.
Day 4. Scratchy sore throat turns vicious, coughing painful. A cold virus, I think. I remember my husband telling me about a long-ago relative whose doctor told her she had a virus and viruses can’t be cured, so she went home, told her family she had an incurable virus, and took to her bed for seven years. I think the story was true.
I spend too much time on the computer. I’m doing it right now. Between files, tabs, and docs, I keep up Google Earth — when it doesn’t crash — catching by accident out of the corner of my cluttered desktop a bolt of a mesa or a canyon’s shadow. I click on it like taking a breath.
Looking in on a wild landscape must be good for the brain, a little flush of serotonin. Like Japanese forest bathing, only in the desert, and on a computer monitor showing overlaid images from private and governmental imaging organizations from around the world.
So, not forest bathing.
Time spent on screens appears to be associated with depression in adults. The intense light interrupts sleep patterns and, somewhere there’s got to be a study that shows this, it makes you into a worse person. Given all that, the best I can do when I’m supposed to be working is click Google Earth and tour around for a moment, like an angel in the sky. A 2015 study amongst 150 university students found that glancing at a monitor showing a roof top garden results in more accurate productivity than the same monitor showing a concrete roof.
Yesterday, I dropped in on mostly local stuff, a 45-minute drive from my house, the torturous bends and goosenecks of the Dolores River as it flows across southern Colorado (pictured above). Zoom in, figure out what needs investigating.
At last, it is here. February 14th: Your favorite party for beheaded Christian martyrs. And your opportunity to tell that special someone just how much you care. So what are you to do now that those gum-lacerating conversation hearts are no more? Or when the greeting cards on offer just involve too many soft kittens lounging on powder-pink throws? Look no further. I visited the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s collection of open-source images and mocked up some card options so you don’t have to!
“I can’t take my eyes off of you…because my nictitating membranes are stuck.”
That’s the name of this garden, a weird fairy hollow situated near the border of the weird fairy artist ranch where I’m staying in Tucson.
I am looking north. I can tell because the sun is at my back. In front of me there is a small trapezoidal fire grate set over a sunken pit surrounded by rocks. On my left is a carved metal screen with a scene of a coyote howling at the moon. I am sandwiched by saguaro.
When you think of plagiarism, poems and books probably spring to mind more easily than, say, scientific papers. And words more easily than images. But plagiarism is not uncommon in science papers, and it often takes the form of images fiddled with and grafted from elsewhere. Whether they’re a consequence of laziness or a desire to mislead, these have played a role in the replication crisis many disciplines are now facing.
It’s a lot more difficult to detect plagiarism and fraud in scientific images than in written text. And even when you have irrefutable proof of wrongdoing, there are some surprising barriers to holding its authors to account. Nonetheless, some people are up to the task.
Meet Elisabeth Bik: by day, a mild-mannered director of science at a microbiome startup. By night (and on weekends), she takes to the internet and sifts through the scientific literature for the subtle visual fingerprints of misconduct. She has identified more than a thousand fraudulent images, and her work has led at least one journal to change the way it screens submissions. Her work has been featured several times by Retraction Watch, a blog that flays scientific malfeasance*.
Bik has contributed countless hours to keeping science honest, but most of them have been unpaid. Why would anyone commit so much of their own time to hunting down details that elude even paid gatekeepers? How does she do it? And does it do any good? I called her to find out.
Until last week, I’d never heard of the Broomway. Now I long to walk it.
