One of the great things about providing sedation for a colonoscopy list is that I can fart all day with impunity if I’m quiet enough about it.
As you may know, my bowels have never fully recovered after catching norovirus trying to help another passenger on a plane a couple of years ago. It’s certainly taught me a lesson: it’s dangerous to pass beyond the curtains that protect business class from the hoi polloi. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even do anything useful at the time, as the air crew and a handy nurse were doing a terrific job without me.
I’ve also been trying to improve my diet since then, although I just did a quiz in the New York Times about fibre and only got 7 out of 12, so clearly need to do more reading on the subject. Here’s the link but probs behind a paywall, soz.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/well/eat/health-benefits-fiber-quiz.html
Mind you, I’ve been thinking that I’ve perfected the art of stealthy farts (or “blow offs” as my outraged grandmother would say, for whom the phrase “passing wind” was indescribably vulgar), but my daughter would tell you otherwise. My hearing damage from last year’s disastrous nocturnal smoke alarm malfunction means that what seems silent to me is anything but to young ears. My brother in law belonged to a friend group that had a code that if you farted, even silently in a way that you’d be perfectly able to maintain your anonymity, you had to own up by saying the word “badger”. As the first daughter in my family with three older brothers, this is the sort of thing that made male friendships an object of envy growing up. Female friendships could be so catty and toxic in comparison.
Anyway, as luck would have it, the surgeon I worked with yesterday, who was doing the scoping, is even deafer than I am. He’s a boomer and too vain to wear his hearing aids, bless him. He asked us yesterday, apropos of nothing, whether we associated hearing aids with old people. “No no no!,” we all said, whilst thinking “yes yes yes!”, although, to be fair, as I told him, I know plenty of people my age and younger who’ve damaged their hearing going to concerts, and what could be more ‘rock and roll’ than that, literally?
The nurses in the room were younger than either of us, and presumably with correspondingly sharper hearing, but they never said anything about any extraneous flatus in theatre. Were they really unaware, were they laughing at me behind my back, or were they being polite, or even kind? I brought everyone some yummy treats from the local bakery as I drove in to work, so maybe this investment in goodwill paid off. In any event, I’ll take being comfortable and blissfully unaware over painful reality any day.