She’s a modern heroine, of the kind Truman Capote couldn’t even have imagined. Holly, the aesthete who must forsake her breakfast at Tiffany’s for a clear liquid diet–followed by an entire gallon of GoLYTELY bowel prep for a chaser.

For those out of the colonoscopy loop, GoLYTELY is a nausea-inducing, salty, slightly lemony beverage. The nurses instruct you to drink the entire gallon prior to the procedure. The procedure itself–sticking a tube with a camera up your tuckus–sounds nasty enough. Rest assured, the prep is worse.

I’ve never consumed more than a gallon of anything except homemade Hefeweisen. In a German beer garden. Let me tell you, bowel prep doesn’t exactly get me clanking beer steins and singing along with my expatriate cronies. For one thing, the prep is saltier than the Dead Sea. For another, it’s supposed to clean out your colon. Almost immediately. It didn’t work that way on me.

It took me a full four hours before I started to reap the benefits of GoLYTELY. Four hours, with a gallon of electrolytes lodged in my gut. Even the generally-enthralling presence of cable TV in my hotel room (I have no TV at home) didn’t make up for the fact that I could barely bend my knees, lest they accidentally knock into my tight-as-a-drum tum-tum.

But why, you ask–why would HollyGoLYTELY submit to a colonoscopy in her late thirties? It’s not a routine procedure until 50! You see, Holly has to atone for her twenty-something lifestyle. In the end, life isn’t all fun and boys and skinny jeans (That’s something Miss Audrey Hepburn discovered, too.) Sometimes it takes a decade or more to evince, but ultimately the laws of physics apply. What goes up must come down. At least in regards to food and the female digestive tract.

Today, Holly GoLYTELY has a clean bill of colon health. Her esophogus wasn’t so lucky. Ulcerated to the point of Swiss cheese–she may want to ask Edith Head to take out the waist on her famous black dress just one more inch. Or else she’d better reserve a bed at the local hospital for a scope every once in awhile. To check on that esophagus before the cells mutate on our poor, skinny heroine. Cancer, see, would seriously put a kibosh on Holly’s socialite lifestyle.