Ever want to wash away your sins?
Purify the core of your being?
Feel all clean and sparkly inside?
Now you can.
NuLitely.
...comes in a plastic gallon container. Mostly empty, except for the handful of crystals at the bottom. You fill the container up the night before and put it in the refrigerator. Instructions wrapped around the container say that NuLitely is much better cold. Right about now you should start shivering in earnest...
The next evening you put on the T.V. and get dressed in something comfortable and easily shredded. Procure a tall glass. Put the heat up, you're going to drink a gallon of cold NuLitely.
The first round is fine. Ok, its not fine. But since you've hardly dented the bottle, you should kid yourself. It's bland stuff. Textured like diluted glycerin. If you look you can see a convex skin on the surface of the NuLitely in your glass that stands up half a centimeter. The taste is like pure seawater. Maybe even a tad less salty than at the beach.
How bad is that? Seawater. We've all drunk enough seawater to know its not that bad, right? Go and sit in front of the T.V. Don't reach for the chips. You won't be hungry soon, anyway. Hopefully you have a friend there with you to set the clock. You've got about 10 minutes till its time for another round. But you're feeling confident.
The next round is less good. The bottle is basically still full. You are full. The clock is ticking. The T.V. is less interesting. It is going to be a long evening.
Right after your third trip to the bar, you make your first trip to the bathroom. In most analogous situations you'd be cut off. But here, please, help yourself to another glass. The bottle is by-and-large still full. And its beginning to be less certain where you need to fill the glass to in order to keep to the instructions. Good thing your friend is there to take over the pouring duties.
Right after the next glass — that you choked down double time due to a scheduling constraint involving the bathroom — it's time for another. The bathroom fan isn't getting turned off at this point and you are clearly going to owe your friend for life.
You gag. You almost throw up into the kitchen sink. Clench your jaw. Hold. Breathe. Relax. Finish the damn glass!
Sometime many hours in the future you must certainly come to the end of the seawater. But, you'll be up all night. By morning you'll be glad the appointment is at 8 AM. Stagger out to the car. Face as gray as the sky. Grit your teeth all the way to the hospital. You can't wait for the general to take hold. After this last 18 hours nothing less than a completely benign screening with no follow-up is acceptable...