To determine just how efficiently my colon cleansing program was working, I had the bright idea to swallow foreign objects, then see how long it took Colonix to whisk them through my system. Here's what happened.
Experiment #1: Handful of change. Everybody knew some kid who swallowed a penny in grade school, then fished it out of the commode a few days later. My plan was to swallow an assortment of coins, then time their way through my system. As the saying goes, "If you want to get to the bottom of things, follow the money." I was going to follow the money out the bottom of things.
I started by swallowing a nickel. Immediately I felt a dull, thick pain sliding down my esophagus, and I regretted not starting off with a smaller denomination. A nickel must be five times the agony of a penny, I realized, massaging my throat. I could feel the coin scraping its way into my stomach, where it landed with a throbbing, heartburn-like pain.
Man, I had a hard time sleeping that night -- and when I did sleep, I had night terrors of Thomas Jefferson, forty times larger than life. Our founding father was squatting over the large dome of Monticello, grunting heavily as he laid out a thick one. He expertly coiled it into a mighty mound of poo, a ropey twist of soft serve on top of that famous dome. Then our third President began shaping it with his bare hands, like Richard Dreyfuss making the tower of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters. It would prove to be a prophetic dream.
The next day, things only got worse. I could feel every inch of my digestive system as the nickel slowly plodded its way through. I couldn't eat or drink anything, because I had a condition known as "dysphagia," which means I could not swallow. Anything I tried to get down my throat backed up like a Manhattan sewer line. It was excruciating, a nightmare of pain.
On the bright side, I was worth five cents more than the previous day.
Periodically I would try to swallow a bit of water or food, which gurgled in my esophagus like a drinking fountain blocked with toilet paper. It occurred to me that this would be a great way of losing weight -- and unlike Jenny Craig, the diet would only cost you five cents. You wouldn't lose interest; you'd only lose weight. You'd gain interest.
By afternoon, I could finally swallow again. Later that evening, the nickel finally passed, presumably into the roomier large intestine, and I no longer had pain. Donning industrial-strength rubber gloves, I rooted through my copious droppings that night, but found no coins. The next day, I continued to search: no change.
Surprisingly, I had to wait two full days before I finally passed the nickel, which looked like Jefferson had been burned in a gas explosion (which, in a sense, he had):
I decided to forego the rest of the coins, and just swallow a dollar bill instead. As you might guess, the dollar was twenty times more difficult to swallow than the nickel, so I had to cut it into bits and wash down Washington with plenty of beer.
By the end of the week, however, I had only retrieved one bit o' bill:
Unfortunately, a fragment of poo-covered American currency is only considered legal tender in Canada, where it's known as "ten dollars."
Experiment #2: Drugs. I had heard stories about "body packers," people who swallow balloons full of heroin or cocaine in order to smuggle them into other countries. Sometimes called "mules" or just "asses," these people occasionally die when drug packets rupture inside their bodies. I can't imagine a more stupid, or more pleasant, way to die.
I went with the kinder, gentler form of body packing: I smuggled two Advil inside a balloon, then swallowed it. At least if it ruptured, I wouldn't get a headache.
I had learned a lesson from my experience with the nickel, so I made the package as small as possible before ingesting it. I had the idea that if the Advil made it through my system intact, I'd take them out of the balloon and swallow them again, in essence making them do double duty. Or, to be more accurate, double doodie.
Apart from some initial discomfort, the packet went through my system much more smoothly than the nickel. Or maybe I just never felt the pain, since the balloon ruptured somewhere along the line:
I'll be honest: I'm not sure those are fragments of the balloon that I eventually located in the Dreyfuss-sized mountain of dung. They were soft and rubbery, but they could have been raisins, corn, or money. With everything I've been eating, it's hard to say.
Experiment #3: Worms. The colon cleansing literature made a big deal about intestinal worms and parasites, which it claimed nearly all of us carry around in our gut. "Western medicine doesn't 'believe' in parasites," the pamphlet said, as if this were all part of a Great Worm Conspiracy.
"Hey, doc? What are these white wriggling things in my dog's stool?'
"Those? Ah, those ... those are noodles."
In the two weeks I had been on the program, I had not seen a single worm in my stool. It's not because Western medicine doesn't believe in them, it's because I don't French kiss dogs. (Usually I skip the foreplay. Unless it's a dachsund, because those bitches love that shit.)
So I decided to see if I could give myself worms. I went into the yard and dug around until I found a fat, frisky one. I figured I wanted a pregnant worm if I was going to properly infest myself, but I didn't know how to check her for eggs. So I held my breath, hoped she was knocked up, and took a bite.
One thing I had forgotten is that cutting a worm in half makes two worms. Or at least that's the way it seemed, with one piece wriggling in my mouth and the other wriggling in my fingers. I tasted iron and grit, quickly swallowing both pieces, which went down like Oyster Jell-O. The flavor was, well, squirmlicious.
Over the next few days, I monitored my poo for worms, which is not as fun as it sounds. I dug through it like a fisherman hunting for nightcrawlers, but I came up with nothing except this odd fragment:
Personally, I think this is a piece of ruptured balloon, but it was getting hard to identify what I was excreting. So I did what anyone else would do: I made an appointment to get a colonic. Those guys would clean me out for good.
