Well just thought I'd follow up and let you folks know how my colonoscopy went -- in a nutshell, it was incomplete, so I'm pretty bummed.
I went in, they put the IV in and administered Versed and Fentanyl, both of which I've had for other conscious sedation procedures before, so I was feeling pretty comfortable at that point. I largely conked out due to the sedative and didn't feel the doctor pump air into my colon or insert the endoscope. So far so good. Then, at some later point (felt like seconds but was really maybe 10 minutes), I partially come to and feel a sharp pain in my abdomen, so I yell to tell the nurse and doctor that it hurts. They give me more drugs via IV (I can hear the doctor giving the orders) and tell me to relax and take deep breaths, but it still hurts real bad. I can barely make out the endoscope moving slightly inside me during this time. This repeats at least several times (I don't recall exactly how many times).
Finally, I conk out again and the next thing I realize is I'm being wheeled out to the recovery room. I ask the nurse how things went and she said they weren't able to finish the colonoscopy.
Apparently the pain I was feeling was when they were trying to make the turn into the transverse colon. They said I'm extremely sensitive there and my colon also has a bit of a twist there so it's hard to navigate. They spent 20 minutes trying to navigate the turn and then gave up because I was in pain despite being given considerably more pain meds than usual. They said that if I wanted to try a colonoscopy again in the future, it would have to be done under general anaesthesia (which I'm perfectly okay with -- in fact I wish I'd just done it under general anaesthesia this time!).
So the only good news I suppose is that there was nothing unusual in the first 1/3 of the colon that the doctor was able to visualize. I suppose this decreases the possibility that there's inflammatory bowel disease since one would expect the rectum or sigmoid colon to show signs of disease if it were responsible for my fissure (since they are closest to the anus). And I guess the other good news is that if I decide to get a colonoscopy again, I'll have nothing to worry about at all since I'll be out cold.
Anyhow thanks a bunch to you all for your support, it helped a lot and was a big part of my even following through with the procedure in the first place. I was hoping to get some peace of mind, but I guess things don't always go the way you'd like them to, and now I'm kind of left wondering why my colon is so sensitive and why there's a weird twist in it. If things had been straightforward, I'd agree that the procedure is no big deal though.