When you are young you don’t think about your health. You just assume, if you’re healthy, you will always be that way. At 50, I no longer take my health for granted, and I am willing to work at it.

Some people get to eat anything they want and never have to worry. I am not one of those people, but I have learned to accept that some people are just LUCKY BASTARDS! As you can tell, I’m not the least bit bitter.

My dog Lucy eats a lot of things that are not good for her. Last week she ate my Maui Jim sunglasses. Not only are they made of potentially toxic materials that could have killed her, but I could have killed her as well, except that she is so cute. Cute is an underestimated factor in the laws of natural selection. Cute is the precise reason my children are still alive, because there have been times…

…so I am conducting a kind of scientific experiment: I bought a new pair of Ray Bans, and a $10 pair of sunglasses on the same weekend. Which one do you suppose will last longer?

At age 50 there are many ways to monitor one’s health. One way is to have a “colonoscopy”. A colonoscopy is a proactive test to screen for colon cancer. The name colonoscopy comes from the Greek words “colon” meaning “colon”, and “oscopy” meaning “50 foot hose with a camera attached to the end”.

Ironically enough, there is a baseball player named Bartolo Colon, who pronounces his last name ”cologne”. However, if you didn’t  know the pronunciation you might have been confused or even offended by the headline that appeared in a local sports page after Bartolo pitched well: “Blue Jays Batters Get A Whiff of Colon”. That’s right up there with classics like “Bird Injures Knee, Celtics Crush Nuggets”.

But getting back to monitoring one’s health, I had a colonoscopy yesterday. (Fifty is fun!) The procedure went well, but I got into a little spat with a nurse at the Colonoscopy Center, because she was the fifth employee of the morning to ask if I was there for a colonoscopy. Apparently, because of the high number of wrong side surgeries at a nearby major hospital, precautions have been taken to assure that no errors are made for any medical procedure. One safety measure is for every employee of every medical office to ask patients to verify the name of the procedure for which they are scheduled. The first four times I thought it was cute. (Again, cute!) The fifth time, however, when the nurse asked me if I knew why I was at the Colonoscopy Center, I replied sharply, like a man with an eating disorder that has not had solid food in 24 hours: “I’m here to get my teeth cleaned!” To say that I got “reamed”  would not be inaccurate, because that really is the definition of a colonoscopy. Whatever happened, I was under heavy sedation.