I am 79 now and not a spring chicken. About 20 years ago my friend Eddie Washburn from a wealthy old Rutherford County family told me about paying cash to participate in a group colonoscopy in Charlotte by Charlotte Gastro. I was immediately interested because my father had just been diagnosed with polyps which had begun to turn to cancer cells. My Uncle Raymond, his brother, had recently died of colon cancer.

My father’s polyps had just been removed before they began to spread cancer to other parts of his body. That’s what they told him. I saw photos of the darkened, diseased polyps; but at the time it had not occurred to me that these may have been stock photos. It occurs to me now.

After some finagling I got myself triaged into a group of Charlotte Gastro colonoscopies, and I watched on the screen as mine was performed by this cordial gastroenterologist with whom I was later to have several more warm conversations. In a few days I got a nice letter here in Asheville from the gastro doctor verifying what I already knew as an eyeball witness: I had no polyps.

I had noticed after the procedure at a Charlotte hospital that there were 8 to 10 men in recovery with me, and most of them had been rolled into the room in stretchers or gurnies as I watched. They were knocked out cold– unconscious. I was the only patient who was conscious and had been conscious all the time through my fascinating colonoscopy. While all these men were beginning to fart in concert, I pulled my hips apart so I could let the air pumped to balloon my colon escape without noise. After a while these men started waking up from the anesthesia; but I had never been asleep, something about me that has always been peculiar. It has happened previous to that occasion and afterwards, as you will see.

One more observation: You can endure a colonoscopy without anesthesia which I did in Greenville, SC in the early nineties when Bill Clinton was in office and the Republican doctor had made crude jokes about Chelsea Clinton. It had been my first and was uncomfortable but not enough to make me howl, or even squirm. It was the laxatives that had irritated me, not the invasion of my colon.

OK, back to my experience with Charlotte Gastro. A week or so after I got my letter of happy relief from the gastroenterologist, I received an alarming statement from a pathology laboratory in South Carolina demanding a whopping cash payment from me for “polyp biopsy and analysis of abnormal cells.”

I immediately began calling their phones and after some of the people I talked to dismissed me like I was a kook, I finally got the administrator of this fraud and talked to him. For brevity I won’t tell you how long it took me to get these greedy scoundrels off my back. Then the Charlotte doctor called me on the phone and apologized profusely and begged me to “let it go” after I had promised the crooks in SC I was going to my attorney general AND the attorney general of SC.

Fast forward 4+ years. The time came here in Asheville for me to have my colon invaded again, so I called Asheville Gastro. An appointments lady there pleaded with me to have their woman doctor perform the formalities, so I agreed. I was to pay cash because I had no insurance and was not yet qualified for medicare.

After all that pain and suffering with the harsh laxative scraping everything — and then some — out of my intestines, I showed up for the procedure. As usual I was administered an intravenous cocktail of demerol and benzodiazepine (Versed) and went through the procedure just as conscious as if nothing had happened. I watched the closed circuit TV screen while everyone else in the room tended to business. All of a sudden this doctor-woman exhibited a snare with a sharp-looped cutter on the end and purported to slide it up my chute and snip something off inside my colon, just a few inches above my rectum. I could see there was nothing there but healthy pink tissue…and certainly no polyp. So this was a fraud. The doctor then probed around upwards for a while… and soon enough the ceremonies were concluded.

Later this doctor, who was soon to quit Asheville Gastro and go elsewhere (or be fired), called me back in for a checkup. She went up my chute and purported to locate the area where she had performed her phantom polypectomy. I was fascinated to see her stick a sharp instrument into healthy, unscarred tissue and cause me to bleed like a stuck hog, but with utterly no pain.

Later I called Asheville Gastro, the only trick in town, and made a fuss. A young Jewish doctor, who impressed me with his gentle manner and candor, went into my colon with his scope and told me he could find no scar. “You won’t,” I told him, “because there had been no polyps and she only went through the motions of removing a polyp. She is a crook.”

Still, a SC pathology lab bill and the bill at Asheville Gastro had piled up to somewhere around $1,000. I wouldn’t pay it and told the bill collectors that I had been fending off a horde of frauds. I told them to “go to hell.” There is no gastroenterologist in WNC who will see me now because Asheville Gastro has ruined my credit with a corrupt bill for services. So now for years I have been playing Russian Roulette with my colon. The only thing I have done is smear little coupon cards provided by my family doctor with small dabs of fecal matter. However, I have been very careful to eat wisely, coddle my microbiome with Mediterranean-styled food, and hope I don’t come down with the dreaded killer, colon cancer.

By the way, my dad lived to be 95 and it was a psychopath urologist digging around in his bladder who killed him. I don’t doubt in my mind for one minute that THAT rat-faced little doctor worked a fraud on my poor old father who was filled with the ambition and the promises of his Heavenly Father to live to be 100 years old. The doctor had made all kinds of promises to my dad, and then when he was in recovery put on his chart he was to receive Tylenol for his post-operative pain. He began climbing the walls in his room at MMH in excruciating agony when I ran to the nurses’ station screaming and demanded something to kill his pain. They thought they could intimidate me with “We’ll call security if you don’t quieten down.”

“You call security,” I said. “I’ll take them to my father’s room and show them how you are causing an old man to needlessly suffer.” A few minutes later an RN was there in my father’s room, as my sister and I watched, giving him a shot of demerol. Because of the brutal stress of this “sawbones” operation, my dad was dead less than a month later. The doctor had been banging away at my father’s bladder AND his wonderful BCBS health insurance policy. I saw his huge bills, all paid by BCBS.