On 24 Nov 2015 I had a colonoscopy. I knew that there were dietary restrictions in the days leading up to it, but since it was ten years since my last one, I couldn't remember what they were. When I received the instructions from my doctor, this time I read them with the eye of the Fruit Explorer. I found that there were dietary restriction for the five days before the procedure. (In another place the instructions said seven days. I was quick to adopt the less restrictive interpretation.)
On the last day before the procedure, no fruit is allowed, though one can drink white grape juice or apple juice.
On the four days before this last day, one is instructed to eat a low roughage/low residue diet. Exactly what "low roughage/low residue" means is spelled out. As for fruit, the following is forbidden.
- Fresh fruit.
- Dried fruit.
- Prunes and prune juice.
- All berries and raisins.
This was a blow to the Fruit Explorer. This meant that there would be no fresh fruit for five days in total. I was plunged into gloom.
The following is allowed.
- Ripe bananas.
- Soft cantaloupe and honeydew melon.
- Applesauce
- Canned or cooked fruits without skins or seeds
- Strained fruit juice.
This list somewhat relieved the gloom since I could have have bananas, cantaloupe, and canned fruit. I thought about trying fruit cocktail, the fruit of my youth, which I haven't had for perhaps forty years, but elected not to. (Circa 1972 Steve Agresta and I decided to take advantage of the economies of scale and bought an institutional-sized, 6 pound, 12 ounce can of fruit cocktail; see picture below. I now keep my plastic dinosaurs in this can, which is just barely big enough to hold them.)
I bought eight bananas of varying degrees of unripeness so they they would ripen as needed over the critical, four-day period. I also got a cantaloupe and a can of pineapple chunks. (Why are canned pineapple chunks allowed while chunks cut from a fresh pineapple are not?) It turned out that I overestimated the speed at which the bananas would ripen, so all eight of them were still unripe on the day of my colonoscopy, and they had to be carried over to the post-colonoscopy period. In "Sticker Shock VIII" you will see the aggregation of PLU stickers from my colonoscopy bananas. Disappointed by my bananas, I struggled through with the cantaloupe and can of pineapple chunks.
The verdict is that a colonoscopy presents quite a challenge to a devotee of fruit. No wonder this procedure has such a bad reputation.
Rick
