Let's shove a tube down your throat!

   Let's not, ok? It isn't fun. Also: Doctors are sadistic.

   Unfortunately, that doesn't even begin to cover it. I was tired and gah a lot last year, which I'm going to put down to stress/growing/not properly understanding the concept of sleep. But my dear mother decided to diagnose me with coeliac disease. (Gluten intolerance.) My doctor was like, yeah, try a gluten free diet. Yeah. Don't. Unless you absolutely have to. You will never be able to eat (anything worthwhile) again. No pasta. No bread. No baking. No sauces. No beer. (Not that I'm big on beer anyway, but that's not the point.) Everything you eat tastes like cardboard. Life is no longer worth living. Sure, there are gluten free alternatives. But they'll never be as good as the real thing. And don't even think you'll ever be able to eat out again. Or go on holiday. Or enjoy life.

   My doctor scheduled an endoscopy, and for six weeks beforehand, I had to eat a whole lot of gluten foods so that if I did have coeliac disease, it would show up in the tests. I've never been so happy in my life. I'd missed regular, gluten-filled sausages. For six weeks, I stuffed myself to death with gluten foods, fearing that this may be the last time I'd ever be able to.

   The day of the endoscopy was one of the most traumatising experiences of my life.

• Step 1:  The back of your throat is numbed with an anaesthetic spray. This is to make it easier to swallow the probe. The nurse told me it tasted like bananas. I guess it did, sort of. Rotten, fermenting bananas.

This is how banana spray traumatised me. I can no longer eat the potassim rich fruits.

• Step two:  You swallow the probe thing. Despute the banana spray, this still hurts. The probe is a tube-like device with a camera on one end. It has to be swallowed, so they can take lots of lovely pictures of your duodenum. Consult a dictionary there if you need to.

What sort of pockets have you got, Oxford?

• Step three:  in order to take even lovelier pictures of your dudune duodenum, they have to pump air into your stomach so they can get a better view. This is like attempting the more advanced sections of the Karma Sutra without proper preparation- your body is not supposed to do that, therefor it will end badly. And hurt.

It is not a flat tyre, so it doesn't need inflating.

• Step four:  did I mention that thanks to the camera, my entire stomach and duodenum was being shown on a television screen- and everyone could see it but me. Because they got me facing the wall where the screen wasn't. So I still am not familiar with my duodenum. (As you may have gathered from this post, I love the word duodenum, and am trying to use it as much as possible.)

• Step five:   What goes in must come out. And, I must say, after all that air was pumped into me, I did the most spectacular burp. I belched like a man. A manly man. A manly man who liked to belch. I've never felt so masculine in my life.

Except for the time I gave myself eyeliner-stubble when I was bored once. That was very manly.

   I got the results a week later. No coeliac disease. Gluten was my friend again. And I love it dearly.