for my 35th birthday I decided to give myself the gift of a colonoscopy it's definitely not the best gift I've ever been given but during the procedure the doctors discovered something that caused them to abort the colonoscopy in today's video with the help of the cadavers here in the lab we're going to discuss the process of receiving a colonoscopy and discover for ourselves exactly what's going on with my body and why the doctors would decide to bail on the procedure it's going to be a crappy one let's do this colorectal cancer is the third most common type of cancer worldwide just behind breast and lung cancer pre-cancerous growths called polyps can grow on the intestinal wall and if left unchecked and become cancerous and spread to your lungs liver and even your brain although not every polyp will become cancerous this is an almost completely preventable form of cancer it's somewhere around 90 or so preventable if you're over the age of 45 getting regular screenings is one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself and your loved ones and if you're under the age of 45 just looking for some peace of mind totally get that please feel free to speak with your primary care physician and get this process going that's what I did and now I have a much better understanding of what's going on with me digesting all right so let's go ahead and figure out what happened to me during my colonoscopy primary instrumentation they used during a colonoscopy is called a colonoscope now this is a very long thin flexible tube that can bend around the anatomy of the large intestine so they can see everything they need to now real quickly I want to note the difference between the large intestine and the colon so right here this is what's known as the rectum then we have the sigmoid colon descending colon transverse colon sending colon and then this right here is what's known as the cecum now the cecum and rectum don't have colon in their name and that's because they don't belong to the colon the colon is going to be the sigmoid descending transverse and ascending but they are still able through a colonoscopy to investigate the entirety of the large intestine and in fact they can even go through here which is known as the ileocecal valve and then investigate the distal end of the ilium or the small intestine so when they insert this tube you also have to order the colonoscope I should say just understand there is a camera on it there is a light on it and there's also a port to eject water that they can kind of flush it things out and then they can remove that water if it has any particulates in there there's also going to be an instrumentation Port that they can insert say if they find a polyp and they want to remove it they can insert the instrumentation go through the colonoscope remove the polyp take the polyp and then take it out so then they can send that to pathology to be investigated so what they do is they just come in here and what they're going to do is they're going to bring the colonoscope in and occasionally they might actually have what's called an endo cuff on it now an endo cuff is kind of like kind of like I don't know kind of reminds me of a starfish has all these little appendages that come off and it allows to spread out the colon so they can investigate everything they need to and they're going to go through looking at the colonic wall and just making sure they don't see any ulcers or inflammatory bowel disease or divertically like a diverticula is actually out pouching it's where the wall of the colon has ballooned out and it creates a little pocket they're not inherently dangerous but they can be again this is all just investigative and then they will go through the transverse colon descending and again like I said they could even go into the small intestine if they choose but then what will happen is then they go backwards in this whole process of going backwards will take about six to eight minutes let's say as they're going through here and the Endo cup is spreading everything apart and they find a polyp that's when again they insert the instrumentation through that Port we'll come in there and they can actually like snare it they can actually then like deprive it of blood and then remove it and then they can take that out but obviously if you do that you're creating a wound and there is going to be bleeding but what's interesting is that upon the removal of a polyp that bleeding will only happen for a very short period of time before it'll then just spontaneously stop bleeding colon just says you're done with that so they'll go through here and then when they're done they just remove it and you're essentially done which is pretty awesome I mean this is a very short procedure the whole thing really takes around 20 minutes or so from the time of insertion to exiting and making sure that everything's done but with me though things didn't go quite as planned but real quick I want to thank the sponsor of today's video athletic greens athletic greens is a nutritional company that makes a nutritional drink ag1 which has become a morning staple for me eg1 has 75 different ingredients including vitamins minerals superfoods probiotics and adaptogens it's completely replaced my daily multivitamin but the thing that gets me most excited are the phytonutrients to help maintain a healthy gut microbiota you see colonoscopies are extremely important there's no doubt about it but let's be real here the colon prep alone essentially evicts all of the healthy microbes in your gut along with the poop so as soon as I was done with my colonoscopy one of the first things I did was mix up some ag1 to help give those microbes everything they need to effectively repopulate my bowels all you do is take one scoop and add it to eight ounces of water and then Shake vigorously look this is super important I mean not really because it's not part of the instructions it just makes me feel happy but Shake vigorously people and then after that you're just gonna drink it and carry on with your day look I am the type of guy that is all about effortless daily habits so knowing that a significant portion of my Essential daily nutrition has been taken care of first thing in the morning is a huge weight off my back if you're interested visit athleticgreens.com human anatomy or you just click the link in the description below and they'll give our audience a one year free supply of immune supporting vitamin D3 plus K2 and five free travel packs with your first purchase again that link is in the description below now I have a very poor recollection of this but there is something knocking around up there about them asking if I wanted if I wanted to continue and I ended up making the decision to abort the procedure the reason is when they got all the way up to my splenic flexure and they were going to go into the transverse colon they discovered that I have what's known as a tortuous colon or a redundant colon meaning my transverse colon is abnormally long so this is going to kind of go be a little weird I'm going to obviously that's gonna distort this but if you have a longer transverse colon it can actually start making Loops that are not supposed to be there so if you can kind of picture if you're trying to get take that colonoscope and make it through all of these Loops that can be very difficult if not outright impossible to do and in fact when they found this in me they then pulled the colonoscope out and switched to a pediatric colonoscope one that's meant for children and they then insert it again and they still could not make their way through here and apparently again I have no recollection of this I didn't feel all that good and I decided to abort the whole thing because it was just causing me discomfort and you can even see this in my procedure report which is super interesting for me to look back on but so then they just kind of went out so what's interesting is I just have images kind of trying to put this back only up to about this point I can see that my colon looks great all the way up to here and then all of a sudden nothing and so there's this part of me that's like you know even though my colonoscopy ended up really good the results of what I got are pretty good it's awesome you're like what's going on over here you know what if there's something bad over there it's kind of interesting that I went through all of this for only half of my colon to be investigated because now I know that I just have a really looped and I mean I say this you know with love and respect messed up colon when it's all said and done they take you back to a room so you can get dressed you can kind of recuperate a little bit they might even give you like some juice or maybe something very small to eat like some crackers and that's when your gastroenterologist will go over the results and what they experience and what the whole procedure was like and for me this again this was super super fuzzy they um they had to give me more medication when they realized I had a tortuous colon and I was experiencing discomfort so for me it's like I have kind of like an exaggerated recovery period but I do remember them coming in and discussing the whole thing with me in fact they give you this it's called a procedure report pretty cool it goes over just exactly what happened your doctor's names like there's a whole paragraph it's saying hey this is exactly what we did and how it went here's the medications you got and they even give you pictures of your colon which I'm sure everybody wants like who doesn't want pictures of the inside of your colon you can tell all your friends right put it on your wall but for me you know they I only have pictures all the way up until my splenic flexure because that's when they saw the tortuous colon but you know I just want to say that this is to me is one reason why I I'm actually a believer in those under the age of 45 getting the colonoscopy because I would never have known or at least not until I was 45 that I had this redundant colon and having a redundant colon that can come with certain issues like I'm more prone to constipation for example so if I was constipated then it would kind of be mysterious like why am I experiencing constipation now I know so there are definite advantages to getting a colonoscopy much earlier on than say going to 45. but again this is something you want to speak with your primary care physician about not just watch this video and say all right let's go schedule colonoscopy thanks for watching everybody I hope you enjoyed today's video be sure to click the link in the description below so you also can enjoy some ag1 Which is far more than a greens drink also look at this awesome picture this is from our sister company Ava we're now starting to sell some really amazing anatomical art this one just always catches my eye it's like I don't know there's something about a black heart I mean it sounds super depressing but I really enjoy it so be sure to click the link in the description below and any of these purchases go to support our channel so we can continue making this outstanding content for you but as always be sure to like comment subscribe if you feel so inclined and we'll see in the next video foreign [Music]