Endoscopy:
Journey through my innards

Hope you can stomach this! But just think -- how often, really, do you get to see what the alimentary canal looks like? I hope the commentary makes it a bit easier to digest. (In case you haven't guessed, you can amuse yourself as much as we did by pondering all the good/bad jokes you can make about innards. Try it!)

Preliminaries: Endoscopy involves the examination of the digestive tract with the use of a fiber optic wire essentially swallowed by the patient. I don't think I was supposed to be unconscious for this procedure, but I must be particularly susceptible to sedation, or perhaps I'm still sleep-deprived enough that my body knows a good nap opportunity when it sees it. In any case, I vaguely remember being told to swallow the end of the wire, and then having my throat sprayed with a local anasthetic (perhaps in the reverse order). After that comes a haze during which the pictures below somehow appeared in my hands. It took a few minutes of squinting at the colors and making out my name before I realized I was staring at rare (unique?) footage of none other than (drum roll...) my innards!

First up (or down, I suppose): my esophagus. (You really don't want to hear the bad joke that goes with this one, but trust me, it requires a lot of context, not to mention a guy named Gus.)
	Then, the bottom of my stomach. The hole seems to be the entrance to our next scene...
... which is somewhere in the vicinity of the duodenum, at the beginning of the small intestine.
	On the return voyage, we can now see the top of the stomach.

After the endoscopy I was given a sheet of paper with post-procedure patient guidelines, which included the admonition: "Don't sign any legal documents or make any important decisions today." Now if only I could arrange to have these done more often...

Concerned friend: So, what were the results of the endoscopy?

Me: I don't know -- it's still in testin'!