Poor readers might better enjoy listening to this piece through WBEZ.

My primary care physician is a very recent Polish immigrant who knows all of the major English words but relatively little about their meanings. When I began to experience profound gastrointestinal distress a few months ago, I visited Dr. Wolinsky She told me to quit drinking and chewing nicorette all the time, and then wrote me two prescriptions. As I stood up to leave, she looked me deeply in the eyes and said, "It is the monkey, but do it you must."

And so do it I did. I even quit drinking. On weekdays. And sure enough, three weeks later, I felt much, much worse. So I returned to Dr. Wolinsky's office.

"You look unenviable," she said, reading my chart as I sat in my boxer shorts on the edge of the examination table. She looked up at me. "We colonoscopy," she announced, as if to colonoscopy were to dance, or to smoke, or to love.

"We do?"

"We colonoscopy Tuesday next."

"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. Wolinsky's personal life, I felt strangely comfortable with her videotaping my colon. But when scheduling the hospital appointment the next morning, I learned Dr. Wolinsky 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. But I comforted myself with the knowledge I was doing the right thing-unlike millions of Americans who should have colonoscopies to check for precancerous polyps but don't.

The night before the procedure, I drank three teaspoons of something called Phosphosoda with a tall glass of Sprite, whereupon I found myself in the bathroom with enough free time to read Anna Karenina, and I began to glimpse why people tend to shy away from colonoscopies.

At the gastrointerology lab at Northwestern Hospital the next morning, I immediately let Dr. Alanson know how I felt about the events of the night before. "I think I might have pooped out my soul."

"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.

Thirty minutes later, I lay in a hospital bed wearing a gown that buttoned in the back. My nurse was an unfathomably hot woman who looked like the lovechild of Katie Holmes and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. My love inserted an IV into my arm, and then dripped the narcotic Demerol into my bloodstream, and the next thing I knew, it was over.

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 Cubs 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. And if I can survive a colonoscopy, anyone can. If you're over 50 and you've never enjoyed one, you should try it. Aside from the not-dying-of-cancer thing, the discomfort is well worth the Demerol. It was the monkey, my colonoscopy. But I did it.