Purging

Today is the day before my colonoscopy. My job today is to allow my colon to get completely purged. This is accomplished by fasting (I've had nothing to eat since midnight), drinking only clear fluids, and, in about an hour, starting to drink this phospho-soda stuff that is going to finish the job in a big hurry. My instructions read "stay close to the toilet after taking this preparation." Should be interesting.

Ironically, yesterday, I experienced a purging of another sort -- while trying to archive several hundred old e-mail messages onto a "jump drive," I somehow made a grave error and lost every message I had in my Outlook Box -- every deleted item, sent item, special folder, and the entire inbox. I lost over 1000 messages. They might be somewhere on my computer...but only a serious techie would find them and my quasi-techie friends looked as hard as they could, to no avail.

At first, I couldn't breathe. I rely on my e-mail for so many things! I had neglected to save a lot of attachments to my hard drive because...why bother? I have the e-mail! (Luckily, I didn't do this too much -- I recently went through and cleaned house a bit, saving the attachments I wanted...I only lost some recent release forms, session outlines, and the like for some speaking and writing engagements I have coming up. I should be able to contact folks and recover them.)
A lot of the e-mail I had saved was sentiments from people, friends or fellow list members, saying nice things to me. On a tough day, a low self-concept day, I'd go through them and remind myself that people do like me and I've impacted on the world a little bit. The tangible reminder is gone, but somehow I still know it's all true.

I'm beginning to accept, even embrace the new, empty, clean slate in my Outlook mail program now. (What makes the situation easier is that somehow, the function that remembers who I am sending mail to remained intact -- I can still type the first letter of a person's name in the "to" line and get that person's address. This is huge, because all "contacts" are gone.) Perhaps it was time to purge.

I'm feeling anxious and scared about the next 20 hours or so, though. I don't want to take the Fleet Phospho-Sodas I was given at my pre-op appointment. I want to have some tortilla chips and bean dip. I want some popcorn, maybe some cheese. I'm hungry!

I don't know what the doctor is going to see when he does the colonoscopy. I have a hunch, but who knows? I've been trying to talk to Bryan about it, but he refuses. "Let's not worry about things until they're real -- let's not think about 'what ifs' right now." He's right.

In about 20 hours, my purge will be over, and I will eat something very satisfying. I'll also have a "clean slate" to start out with, which I will likely learn to accept and embrace. Perhaps, it was time to purge.