‘Grand-papa? Is that you?’: Ryan Reynolds reveals how to terrify your anesthesiologist while Rob McElhenney doubles down on polyps

Say one thing about Ryan Reynolds. Say that he can never bring himself to be serious or not crack a joke in any given situation, even if it happens to have been a life-saving colonoscopy.

Imagine showing up to work one day and seeing Ryan Reynolds and his buddy Rob McElhenney, with whom he owns a football team, sitting patiently in the hospital’s waiting area ready to be anesthetized and undergo an endoscopic examination. Now, if you’re really good at your job, you will maintain an air of professional politeness and go through the motions as you would with any other patient. If you’re a fan, however, you might begin to lose your nerve, you might realize that you’re going to be inserting a camera up Deadpool’s anus and into his colon, and you might find it unnervingly hilarious that Deadpool himself would probably have a field day with this.

Worst of all, you can be sure that Ryan Reynolds isn’t going to make it any easier for you. Taking to his X account to astutely remind everyone of the colposcopy treatment he publically documented in 2022, pointing out that “colonoscopies save lives.” The actor gave us extra incentive by explaining how you could “really scare the sh-t out of the anesthesiologist.”

“You can make it fun: As they start to put you under, try pointing at the ceiling, then whisper, ‘Such warm light. Grand-papa? Is that you?’ Then pass out. It’s a fun way to really scare the s*t out of the anesthesiologist,” he wrote.

In all seriousness, Ryan’s doctor can be seen in the video explaining that the procedure probably saved the actor’s life. “You did such a good prep that I was able to find an extremely subtle polyp that was on the right side of your colon,” he says. “This was potentially life-saving for you. I’m not kidding—I’m not being overly dramatic. This is exactly why you do this, okay? You had no symptoms.”

At which point, Ryan, in typical Ryan fashion, quips by saying, “I can’t believe you pumped all that Aviation Gin into my IV.”

Rob McElhenney didn’t fare any better, though he insisted it was a win-win situation for him anyway. “They either find nothing, and that means my colon was cleaner than his, or they find a polyp, and it’s either bigger than his, which is awesome, or smaller than his, which means I had less of an opportunity to have cancer.”

They ended up finding three, so I guess the importance of getting a check-up every now and again can’t be overstated, even if it comes at the expense of scaring the needles off of anesthesiologists.