For years I had been putting off this screening, the very principle of which repelled me. Every year, my doctor pestered me to do it. At the time, I promised. Then, once I walked through the door of his office, I didn’t think about it anymore. Social Security sent me letters that I hastened to put in the bottom of a drawer. Just the name terrified me: “colorectal cancer screening kit”. You might as well send me a death announcement directly, it would go faster.
I didn’t want to know anything. I was in apparently good health. I ate healthily. I was getting busy. Was I going to send a sample of my stools so that a foreign eye could examine them and determine if, without warning, cancer was not working towards my disappearance? No, no, three times no! My stools belonged only to me; Besides, when I happened to contemplate them, I found nothing suspicious about them. I was king in my toilet, there was no question of sharing this power with an illustrious stranger.
Sometimes I wavered in my certainties. A random celebrity, much younger than me, had just died of colon cancer. Fear overwhelmed me. What if I was next in line, I wondered? If there, at this very minute, cancer were not tormenting my colon to the point where, when it was discovered, there would be nothing to oppose it except my wish to be buried without ceremony or speech. I already saw written on my tombstone: “Here lies the biggest moron, dead from not taking his test in time.”
The pressure was building. I promised myself I would do it the following week. Then the next one… I started watching explanatory videos on how the test took place. A simple formality. In less than three minutes, the matter was over. Why the hell was I stubborn in my refusal? It was not fear, nor laziness, but a sort of disgust born from the conventions, from the scabrous nature of the thing, as if I was being asked to perform a dishonorable, repulsive gesture, bordering on the forbidden.
Last Wednesday, for some unknown reason, all my resistance fell away. We were the 1er April, an hour or two before Passover begins. Could there be a better time to carry out what seemed to me then like an enormous metaphysical farce, those tasks which we carry out both to mock death, while hoping for its arrival as late as possible? Yes, in this 1er April, I, healthy in body and mind, at the precise hour when my glorious ancestors were preparing to leave the land of Egypt as free men, I was going to carry out an examination which would determine the rest of my existence – at least, so I thought.
I unpacked all the paraphernalia from its envelope. Nothing was missing, from the paper to cover the toilets to the pipette which I used to collect a few particles of the material directly extracted from my guts. No need to lie, as I headed towards my place of ease, I was not going well. Let’s even say that I was shaking like a leaf. Mentally, like an airplane pilot preparing for an emergency landing, I repeated the procedure to follow: the first push necessary for ejection, the quick grip of the stick intended to collect a little of my triumphant turd, the placement of said rod in its case, all obviously without making a mistake in the order of the procedure.
I opened my toilet with the apprehension of a surgeon who, for the very first time in his young career, is about to operate on a patient. Obviously, feverish as I was, I placed the paper upside down where the testament of my intestines would soon rest. Fortunately, I corrected my mistake in time, then, once I had experienced the otherwise relatively solidity of the device, with one hand firmly holding the precious pipette, I took my place on this bowl and waited for the miracle to come.
Ten minutes later, I was still waiting. I was a bit tense, so much so that despite my repeated efforts and my tearful prayers, from my successive pushes, nothing came of it except an increasingly increased fatigue in my thighs. I wasn’t going to fail now, at the gate of the promised land. I concentrated like never before: if Moses had been able to split the waters of the Red Sea in two, I could also break the wall of my temporary constipation and thus open the path to passing my test.
My tenacity finally paid off. I finally expelled the black gold from my culial orifice and without even waiting for it to cool, with the celerity of the most gifted archer, I pricked it with my rod in several places, enough to exceed the required level. A second later, the stick was resting in its case. The next minute, the case had joined the pre-filled envelope. And, caught in the intoxication of my success, having barely had time to get dressed again, I rushed down the stairs four at a time, running breathlessly along the Avenue de la République, before dropping it off in the first mailbox that came along.
Since then, I have been waiting for the results. And from being temporary, my constipation has become eternal. Other than that, everything is fine.
