My primary care physician is a very recent Polish immigrant who knows a number of English words but very little about how to organize them in sentence form. Some people want a doctor who speaks to them in a manner they can understand, but all I want is a doctor who will prescribe me the drugs I want whenever I want them. You can say a lot of bad things about Dr. Volinsky. You can say, for instance, that she does not seem to have a license to practice medicine. But you cannot say that she is averse to prescribing drugs.

So when I began to experience profound gastrointestinal distress about six weeks ago, I visited Dr. Volinsky and told her what I needed some Levsin and a 30-day course of the antibiotic Cipro, just in case I'd gone and caught gastrointestinal anthrax. She told me to quit drinking and chewing nicorette all the time, and then wrote me the prescriptions. As I stood up to leave, she looked deeply into my eyes and said, "It is the monkey, but do it you must."

And so do it I did. I took my Cipro and my Levsin. And sure enough, three weeks later, I felt much, much worse. So I visited Dr. Volinsky again.

"You have weight loss," she said, looking over my chart as I sat in my boxer shorts on the edge of the examination table.

"I know," I told her. "I've lost seventeen pounds in three weeks. This is a fantastic diet."

"What you need," she said, "is to be eat all the time."

"I eat! And then I -- you know -- well -- you know. Diarrhea."

"All the time! Be eating now!" she screamed.

"I don't have any -- "

"We colonoscopy," she announced, as if to colonoscopy were to dance, or to smoke, or to love.

"We do?" I asked.

"We colonoscopy Tuesday next," she said.

"Won't that hurt?" I asked.

"You sleep like baby. They put camera. They take camera. You sleep. Like drunk husband."

Armed with such intimate knowledge of Dr. Volinsky's personal life, I felt strangely comfortable with her videotaping my large intestine. But when scheduling the hospital appointment the next morning, I learned Dr. Volinsky would not be administering the colonoscopy. It would be a man I had never met named Dr. Alanson.

Much as I do get a certain thrill out of being anally penetrated by a man whose first name I do not know, I felt a little nervous in the days leading up to the procedure.

For 24 hours before the colonoscopy, I wasn't allowed to eat any solid foods, which wasn't particularly challenging, since I'd only eaten fourteen grains of rice and one small cup of chicken broth in the past twenty-seven days. At seven p.m. the night before the procedure, I drank three teaspoons of something called Phosphosoda with a tall glass of Sprite.

A little advice to anyone facing a colonoscopy: DON'T DRINK THE PHOSPHOSODA.

I'm not sure what they do to you if you show up for your colonoscopy and you haven't ingested the stuff, but it can't possibly be worse than what happens to you when you do drink it, which is that you suddenly find yourself in the bathroom with enough free time to read Anna Karenina.

I'm not sure how my fourteen grains of rice and one small cup of chicken broth turned into fifty liquid tons of bodily waste, but suffice it to say that in the moments before I drank the Phosphosoda, I weighed a robust one hundred and twenty-six pounds, and by the next morning, a strong wind picked me up and blew me to the hospital.

When I arrived at the gastrointerology lab, I immediately let Dr. Alanson know how I felt about the events of the night before.

"It was like I was shitting out my soul," I said.

"There is no physical soul," he responded, and I could tell right away that Dr. Alanson was the fun-loving sort of doctor I had always wanted to perform my colonoscopy. He was just like Patch Adams!

Thirty minutes later, I lay in a hospital bed wearing a gown that buttoned in the back. It was an excellent garment in every regard -- except for the penis-covering regard, at which it failed spectacularly. This became particularly troubling to me when I met my nurse, an unfathomably hot Afghan immigrant who looked like the lovechild of Katie Holmes and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. My love inserted an IV into my arm, and then dripped two different narcotics into my bloodstream. I did not feel immediately sleepy.

"Should I feel sleepy yet?" I asked.

"No."

I waited an agonizing four seconds before asking again, "Should I feel sleepy yet?"

"No."

It took a great deal of restraint, but over the course of the next four minutes, I only asked, "Should I feel sleepy yet?" 722 times. And then, mid-question, I fell off into a blissful slumber. I dreamt that the nurse and I were standing alone on a windswept plain in eastern Afghanistan when a disembodied voice gave us the news: The Taliban were ousted from power, and the burqa could be removed.

I learned a lot of things from my colonoscopy, but I think the most important lesson was this: If there is anything that can wake you from a perfectly good dream about ravaging your Afghan lover, it is having the tube in your ass turn a corner in your intestinal tract.

"Oh God you're killing me," I shouted, suddenly awake.

"This will go easier if you just relax and take deep breaths," Dr. Alanson said.

"This will go easier if you just remove the camera from my ass," I said.

"More Demerol."

And then I was back in Afghanistan, firing a Kalishnikov into the air with one hand and caressing the ripe breast of my beloved with the other.

I awoke to the beatific site of my exotic nurse. She spoke to me slowly, stretching each syllable across time and space like an opera singer holding the final note of her solo.

"You're going to feel like farting," she said. "Just go ahead and let it out."

I farted and slept and woke and farted and slept. It was like a Sunday afternoon alone in my apartment watching the Bears and eating chili, except I was as high as Daryl Strawberry on payday.

A week later, Dr. Alanson called me and said that all the tests were negative. He told me to quit chewing nicorette and quit drinking wine, both of which I plan on doing just as soon as I am laid dead in the grave. Nonetheless, my gastrointestinal health has improved, if for no other reason than my intestines now understand the kind of torture they can expect when they cause me trouble. It was the monkey, my colonoscopy. But I did it.