Dr. Smith At Your Cervix

 

In October 2011, this piece was named a Finalist in  “America’s Funniest Humor!”(TM) Writing Contest held by HumorPress.com, one of the Internet’s highest-ranking humor contest sites.

This is where I speculate on the speculum and get intimate with the misunderstandings and blunders that come out of a visit to a male gynaecologist.

Why would a man in his right state of mind want to become a gynaecologist? And why would a woman ever choose to go to a male gynaecologist in the first place? After all, a guy would not consider a female urologist to get his deep south checked.

I have always questioned men’s motives for choosing gynaecology as a profession. Scenes of male doctors talking about “freaky fannies” didn’t help dispel my lingering suspicion that some male docs have something other than a mere clinical interest in the V before the Monologue.

With a bunch of these thoughts tumbling in my mind, I recently ‘chose’ to go to a male gynaecologist. Reasons for my decision would fill my word count, but suffice to say that I was left with a smeared feeling. From the moment I fixed the appointment I became a nervous wreck, and every time the thought crossed my mind I heard the needle scrape off the record playing in my head. Female friends tried to reassure me – “It will not be as bad as you think” they said. “It will only take a few minutes of your life,” and “Male gynes have absolutely no sexual feelings for their patients – they see so many of ‘those’ that for them it’s no different from examining an elbow or a knee” they consoled. They could well have stuck a tag with ‘Prehistoric’ written on it on my back and got it over and done with.

Yet no amount of cajoling would work and by the time the red-letter day arrived I had no choice but to mentally switch to constant hysterical laughter mode, a defence mechanism which has got me through many a tough time. When I reach this stage of mental frenzy, all rationality in my brain is replaced by re-runs of my favourite stand up comedies. In fact as I was scrubbing and polishing my family jewel (as you do for the ever dreaded yearly appointment), I was seriously tempted to wear my ‘Cute Beaver’ t-shirt that sports a toothy rodent as a picture.

I finally got to the clinic with a supporting friend in tow. I managed to act calm and contained until we got to the waiting room and found a group of ladies chatting away as if they were simply sneaking a cigarette break and a coffee. How could they be so unperturbed knowing that they were about to expose their insides to a complete stranger of the opposite sex?

After what felt like forever and a day, we were finally called in. I don’t think I ever looked at the doc and to this day I simply cannot recall his face. He sat us down and started off by asking my friend a zillion questions about her lifestyle and cycle. “Are you active,” he asked. Since my friend is a fitness devotee, and looks like pure muscle on legs, I almost gagged at the obviousness of his question. “Of course,” she said, “I try to exercise regularly.” He gave her a weird look until we finally realised that what he meant to say was “Are you sexually active?” Now why didn’t he just come right out and ask her that in the first place?

Then he got up from his chair and asked her to remove only her panties, and to get on the couch. With the comedy store still running in my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder how she would get only her panties off without removing her jeans. Of course, she knew what he meant so she briskly removed everything and hopped on to the couch. Though she acted cool and dignified, my toes were already pointing towards the door. As she lay there, stark naked and staring at the ceiling, the doc handed her a square paper napkin to cover her ‘private part’. Clearly this is his attempt to make his patients feel a little more comfortable but please let it be universally known that a 20cm by 20cm piece of paper does not do the trick.

Then a huge circular spotlight with at least eight 700watt bulbs went on, strategically pointing towards the sacred spot. At this point I was mentally out the door, in my car, driving off at full speed towards the proverbial horizon; but then I saw that the infamous speculum was not the metal, cold one that I had psyched myself up to expect. Instead it was a disposable plastic one that looked rather tame. So I made haste slow. I sat there pretending I wasn’t interested in what was happening to my friend, but in reality my eyeballs were popping out of their sockets in an attempt not to turn my neck and make my concern so obvious. Unfortunately this made my friend so nervous that no amount of jelly was going to make her experience painless. As hard as she tried not to discourage me her distressed facial expressions made me want to slap the doctor into another profession.

Her sore ordeal over, he casually moved up to her breasts. As he thumped away at them, with my friend still feeling her insides in her throat, he asked whether she ‘touches’ them every day, then immediately added, “If I were you, I’d touch them a bit every day” (try to imagine how that sounded in Maltese). I can’t believe that a gynaecologist who goes through this every day of his life would deliberately choose these words to advice a female patient to check (touch) her breasts on a daily basis.

Her inspection was over, and not a second too soon. By now I was in such a state that I had to focus on one spot on the doc’s desk in order to stop the room from spinning me into another galaxy. I scurried through the “Are you active?” question but then he asked “How heavy are you?” I automatically blurted out 53kg and there came the weird look again. Clearly I should have automatically understood “How heavy are my periods.” But, with all due respect, how do you answer that? In ounces? Cubic centimetres? Pad changes?

The good thing was that the ineptness of this question made me look forward to the part when he’d ask me to remove only my panties which I did in less time than it takes to say ‘ovary’. I hopped on to the couch almost breaking a hip in the process, and lay there with my arm over my eyes, rapidly reaching Frasier Crane’s levels of awkwardness. My brain went into override trying to figure out what in the world possessed me to ever do this, but before I knew it, I was introduced to the square paper napkin, the alien light, the jelly soaked speculum, fingers, and an experience to write about.

Making small talk with the man who had just had a good look at our intimate insides seemed the order of the day. He complimented us with a ‘prosit’ (for what I haven’t figured out yet) and went on with a candid explanation of how over-cleaning is bad for a woman’s intimate area. This explanation involved the words ‘gently’ and ‘shower head’ accompanied with graphic hand and finger gestures. I walked out of there with tears of laughter brimming out of my eyelids and a heart attack in the making.

Notwithstanding the funny side of things, and my total conviction that a male gynae can be as good as a female one, despite not having ever driven the car he is servicing, I’m still not convinced that there is a level of professionalism that will ever repress any man’s sexual urges. I would love to believe that when a decent looking girl (or in this case two) has her legs spread in front of them, these doctors are not turned on. Does medical school teach them not to have dirty thoughts while at work, and to somehow turn them back on when they go home to their partners?

I used to be a strong believer in the philosophy that we should experience everything at least once in our lives. I have now revised my dogma to ‘almost’ everything.

First published on FM Magazine September 2008