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Comment by gniv | Hacker News Reader

The prep is by far the worst of it. I wish they could do it differently.

There's an option which doesn't involve drinking any yucky fluids, just water. SuTab. You have two rounds of twelve pills that you drink with three cups of water at various intervals.

I've done it enough times that I'm totally fine with it: the electrolyte drink tastes like slightly bad-tasting Gatorade, which is hardly worth caring about.

And you get diarrhea-like bathroom runs half a dozen times maybe.

Yes it was annoying to get the runs and gross to drink the stuff the first few times, but people eat things like cow tongue or live octopus or whatever... I can handle some bad-tasting Gatorade and some diarrhea just fine, especially given the 5 years of peace-of-mind it buys me afterward.

People react differently. I took the same prep but the waves of nausea and cramping were so intensely painful I sweat through all my clothes and passed out on the toilet. It was some of the worst hours of my life. I’m just over 40 and have some symptoms to check which turned out to be benign, but it was such a harrowing experience I will be doing this as infrequently as possible.

I had a colonoscopy + upper endocoscopy a few months ago, age 29.

The prep was horrible, particularly the electrolyte drink they make you take the night before. I almost puked several times trying to get that stuff down.

Actual procedure was a breeze. I was sedated, and then I woke up and it was over.

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