Cavity Search.

“Why is it that when I come to see you, I always leave with a referral involving my body cavities?”

Staring up at the clinically white ceiling tiles as laughter bubbles up from below the flimsy paper precariously draped across my stirrup-ed knees, I now know how exposed the Coyote feels when he steps off the ledge. Except that today the Roadrunner is wielding a two-sided shoe horn.

And I am … um … not.

(And we all know that if I make any sudden moves on this uncomfortable little slab, whatever is in that glass of yours will be spraying out your nose and onto your keyboard while you read about it. So I am staying put to avoid telling you about the medical process that would be required to remove the shoe horn.)

This is déjà vu all over again. One year ago I was staring at the same clinically white ceiling tiles listening to a disembodied voice tell me that my intestinal tract needed a thorough review. The year before? Nurse Broomhilda promised that everything would bounce back after she let me out of her mashable torture chamber. And now this.

Another spelunking expedition. Inside me.

Listening to her talk about microscopes and tissue samples and sedation, panic wraps its familiar fist around my chest and I close my eyes against the fear rushing through my head in an angry roar I’ve known before.

I’ve hit the genetic jackpot, putting me on the fast-and-early track for highly undesirable procedures. The odds are not necessarily in my favor, but they aren’t against me either. But as the only factor in the parental equation, they are undeniable and unavoidable, and this one is a little less preventable and a little more exploratory. My children cannot afford parental stupidity, which is why I begrudgingly push aside my stubborn streak and cash in my doctor’s tickets to the not-so-fun house.

But it is not today and the roar vanishes into the hum of the fluorescent bulbs, and her voice returns.

“So, nothing can go in there for at least two weeks.”

I assume that includes marbles.