Did Eric Adams get a colonoscopy? We’re trying to get to the bottom of it.

When performing a colonoscopy, doctors send a small camera through the human large intestine to search for signs of cancer. Mayor Eric Adams and his press team sent reporters down an equally long, winding, at times scary path that, unlike the medical procedure, provided little new information about Adams’ health.

Adams was asked during his off-topic press conference on Wednesday about his mysterious illness last week that prompted him to cancel his public schedule for three days. Adams said that after feeling pain in his side, his doctor ordered a series of medical tests, including an unspecified procedure that required being put under anesthesia. “The doctor said, ‘Eric, I want you to take a series of tests,’ and I decided to do that. And when I sat down, I was telling (my son) Jordan, ‘Jordan I went to the doctor and he wants me to take some tests, and I’m going to have to go under for one of them,’” Adams recalled. “So thanks to the team, I reached out to the team and said, ‘Fabien, listen, I’m going to go under for a couple of days, I'm going to still be in communication’ but I was going to be under anesthesia. So I wanted to make sure that the team knew and that the team did what they were supposed to do.”

The revelation that Adams was under anesthesia – an incapacitated state that could trigger Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to become acting mayor under the city charter – prompted a swirl of questions about what procedure Adams underwent, and whether he was in fact still mayor during it.

When pressed on those questions later on Wednesday, City Hall’s press team said that Adams had a colonoscopy – and argued that Williams wasn’t acting mayor, citing an executive order that designates the first deputy mayor to take over the duties of mayor when he’s unable to carry them out. 

As reporters continued to press on that (still contended) point – and after a report that the colonoscopy actually happened weeks ago – City Hall revised what Adams said hours before, saying that the mayor wasn’t in fact put under anesthesia last week, but weeks earlier during a colonoscopy on Jan. 3. The First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer assumed additional duties for 45 minutes to an hour, according to the mayor’s Press Secretary Kayla Mamelak-Altus. That was unbeknownst to Williams or the public. 

According to the mayor’s public schedule, he had two events on Jan. 3 – a routine meeting with his staff at 8 a.m., and an interview with The Riverdale Press at 4 p.m. City Hall confirmed he attended both.

By the end of the day Wednesday, Mamelak-Altus said that Adams was put under anesthesia once, for the colonoscopy on Jan. 3, and not at all last week. But she said the mayor’s doctor ordered additional tests – including an MRI, bloodwork and a test for a stomach infection known as H. pylori infection – which he underwent last week and gave Adams orders to take it easy.

Adams and City Hall have said that all tests came back negative.