The SF Chronicle obit is much better. It’s weird that the Post invokes his emotional interview without saying what he point blank wanted to convey to people:

“I made a mistake when I was younger ... not getting a colonoscopy,” Corsi said. “I should have done it. If you’re out there, don’t wait. Don’t be stupid. I was a professional athlete, I thought I was invincible.

“Cancer is not prejudiced to anybody. Don’t wait, you don’t want to end up like this. If you get it soon enough, you’ll be all right.”

here

I had a huge amount of Jim Corsi cards relative to the type of player he was. I remember looking at some of the gaudy ERAs and wondering why he didn't pitch more. RIP.

I saw Jim Corsi’s name on a headline and thought it was about him signing with Oakland or Baltimore yesterday. He was the kind of relief pitcher who earned a type of immortality. When a term paper spambot resurrects this thread in 12 years, I’ll assume Corsi had signed with Scottsdale or Trumpton and eventually remember the colonoscopy that I now hope will have saved my life.

I like to imagine that after he hung up his spikes he got into hockey analysis and refined the +/- stat. RIP

I presume that a colonoscopy might've saved my mother's life, or at least pushed off her demise for a few years (she was, after all, born in 1927); she died from colon cancer a day before she'd have turned 57. Probably such proactive procedures weren't particularly common in (a) the early '80s in (b) backwoods Arkansas, though. Still, someone should've been paying more attention, as she'd had fairly severe gut-related issues since at least her college years, some 4 decades previously.

When the cancer was detected the summer of '83, the doctor told me she had 6-9 months left, & she hit 9 pretty much on the nose. She was never told it was terminal, judging from a letter I came across a few years ago that a friend had written to her not too long before her death.

All of which reminds me that my own GI guy might have forgotten I exist. My last couple of colonoscopies yielded pretty clear results, with only a couple of polyps popping up, so he moved my schedule for the procedure back from every couple of years to, I guess, whatever the norm is for a guy in his early 60s -- every 5 years, maybe? I sort of suspect it's been longer than that. Probably not the best idea in the world, given not only my mother's mode of death but also my decades-long history of Crohn's.

Oh, well. No one lives forever.

My family has colon cancer history and I've been told to get colonoscopies every five years. Ask your doctor about it if you think it's been more than five years gef.

Seems like I've had at least one since the procedure 11 1/2 years ago (thanks to Facebook for the date) when I discovered via small talk that the attending nurse was the first cousin of the sports editor at my old newspaper in Little Rock. But yeah, clearly I need to check.

I'd forgotten, but my FB post says the paperwork showed I was there for an endoscopy, as opposed to the colonoscopy that was actually the reason. So they did both. No big deal, I'm sure, especially since insurance covered any extra expense. And hell, I was unconscious; they could've sawed off my right arm for all I knew.

Speaking of which (the unconsciousness part, not the amputation part), I remember a gf telling me before my 11/1/00 procedure (I remember the date because I was bitter over having had to skip a Halloween party & attendant food offerings) that her estranged husband had been awake for his colonoscopies. Makes me wonder if that's something they used to do, or if he just anesthesia-averse.

I have vague memories of having one done a few years earlier while I was anesthetized into a so-called twilight state; maybe that's what she was referring to.

I have vague memories of having one done a few years earlier while I was anesthetized into a so-called twilight state; maybe that's what she was referring to.

That's how mine have been done too. I'm told that it's effectively a combination painkiller/muscle relaxant/amnesiac that they give me.

The sigmoidoscopy that produced my Crohn's diagnosis in 9/88 (a mere 11-odd years after things started going wrong in that area of my anatomy) was definitely conducted during twilight state. I'd pretty much bet money, though, that the 3 or 4 colonoscopies I've undergone since the late '90s were conducted while I was completely unconscious. Unless the amnesiac you refer to really did its job.