This weekend I prep for a colonoscopy on Monday morning. At 53, I’ve evaded this procedure through the genius of pharmacological progress, meaning I did that Cologuard thing, where you send a poop sample through the mail (or UPS?) and they say, “yeah, pretty good.” 

That was good enough at 50, but not good enough at 53. And who am I kidding, really? My father, the esteemed Ed Ditmarston, developed Stage 2+ colon cancer at age 64 because he refused to get a colonoscopy. I was actually with my father, in a raft on the Colorado River with a bunch of Mormons, including a physician, who advised him to get a colonoscopy. This raft trip was in the late 1990s, so my dad was in his late 50s or early 60s. 

Dad laughed and waved the Mormon doc off. Then five or six years ago, bammo, cancer. 

My father hated doctors and claimed that he had been oppressed by an overmedicalized childhood, that my grandmother constantly talked doctors. I wasn’t clear whether she took my dad to doctors all the time, but he would not see a doctor until whatever it was quite serious. 

This attitude extended itself to my brother and to me. I was rarely sick but my brother did suffer. As adults, we both see doctors, and I work in pharmaceutical advertising. I take my kids to doctors. I have been telling myself that I am not like my dad at all in this respect, but in the last few months, I see that I am a lot like him. 

Why are you telling us this? 

Because today I centered my walkabout around picking up my colonoscopy prep kit. But let me back up, to yesterday, when a very nice thing happened. 

My neighborhood boyfriend revealed that he understands our imaginary relationship

I have had a neighborhood boyfriend now for about 10 years. He owns the independent pharmacy in my hood (right on Ditmarston Boulevard), and I get a huge kick out of him. At first, he didn’t really give me the time of day, even though I was immediately loyal to him for no reason I could consciously identify. 

But you could go right in and talk to him or the beautiful Cypriot girls who worked there. They also had excellent toys, which my kids loved when they were little. They had an official activity with their most ineffective nanny (who only lasted a month) where they would stand in front of the pharmacy and stare at the toys through the window every day for about ten minutes. 

Then a very dark day came, the day we found lice in Daisy’s hair. We went to the pharmacy for combs and hair poison, and there, the pharmacist—let’s call him Stanley—examined me and found lice in my hair. 

That was the day he became my neighborhood boyfriend

What else was I going to do. The man found bugs in my hair. I could either never go back to the pharmacy or just accept him into my heart. Clearly I was not giving up this magical pharmacy. 

So after that we started chatting pharma more often and he began giving me some neighborhood gossip. I was just getting into local politics then, so I tried to work him but he wasn’t that receptive, although he loved to chat. I am a chatter, so we chatted.

Then the pandemic came and things moved along. As they say, our relationship, well, I wouldn’t say it deepened. Our relationship funned up.

Have I mentioned I am a vaccine criminal? 

I originally got the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Calvin made my appointment and that was what was available. I tried to be a good vaccine citizen and just take the first vaccine offered, but everyone else was getting Pfizer and Moderna and I felt I had inferior protection. I really felt it and made my family aware of these feelings. Finally Calvin just said, “Figure out how to get the other one if it bothers you so much!”

So I made another appointment for the 2-dose vaccine, and went in with my birth certificate that showed my maiden name, and my Writer’s Guild card, which also has my maiden name, and I got the 2-dose vaccine. 

I had to confess this to Stanley because I needed to get the booster, which he administers, and I didn’t want to mess around. He and the counter ladies were shocked, and every time I came in they would ask me if I was getting the Russian or the Chinese vaccine. I showed him my 2 vaccine cards and we put all my boosters on my real last name’s card. 

There are lots of fun things with Stanley. His daughter works in the beauty industry so free stuff comes to his house—although I’m not sure she still lives there. He puts these fancy, crazy products out for free. It’s like the beauty closets in fashion magazines, where all the samples get put out for staff. I rarely paid for shampoo or conditioner when I worked at those magazines. From Stanley, I got some ineffective hemp-based lip-plumping gel, and some great face masks, and some nice lipsticks. When the products are out, you have to grab fast.

Most recently Stanley has been growing marijuana in his yard, and right before Christmas he gave me a bag of his weed. I wish I had nicer things to say about this weed, but it wasn’t that great. Don’t get me wrong, I still smoked it and was thrilled to accept it, although he made me promise I would not sell it. 

Being a weed salesperson has never been my dream

Well, maybe it was, briefly, in high school. But not lately.

Back to our relationship status: I went to the pharmacy yesterday for the colonoscopy prep and they were out. There are lots of supply issues right now with all sorts of pharmaceuticals. It’s very, very weird. So they called another drug store to get the kit and Stanley said to the counter lady, “Tell them it’s for my girlfriend.” And then he winked at me!

We are together. He is my real neighborhood boyfriend. I played it cool but it was thrilling. After all these years, we are a couple.

Back to today: I went to Stanley’s and he was not there, but the lovely lady at the counter gave me the lowdown on how to self-administer the enema. She was so nice, and she probably would have been that nice even if I wasn’t Stanley’s girlfriend.

But I like to think it helps.