I am sure that title conjures up fond memories for anyone reading this with double 'x' chromosomes. Being health conscious myself and not actually having had a Well Woman Exam since before I moved to Norway, I called last week and made an appointment. Unfortunately, they had an opening the next day. So no week of mental preparation, no calling to cancel (like the one I made 6 months ago), no fleeing the country, etc - just had to show up.
Got in the office, take my blood pressure - 120 over 64, looking good (notice we skipped the scale entirely), temperature fine. And no - I am NOT going detail every minute of my appointment - I just felt a RANT coming on....
The nurse pulls two small pieces of tissue paper out of a drawer and says: "Take off everything, put the top on with the opening in the front and drape the sheet over your legs". Yeah. It looks like the stuff I just put in a gift bag ... this is just white instead of purple (which I guess is a blessing right there isn't it?)
..
.
.
So I'm sitting there, smart enough to have brought my cell phone with me to the table, and I am trapped. When the nurse left, she failed to pull out the 'kiddie step' and I am short, and stupidly climbed up without pulling it out myself. If I tried to get off the table, it would be a bit of a drop and I could see me splayed on the floor, a twisted ankle with tissue paper strewn about.... (the naked part goes without saying, right?)
My cell phone doubles as a PDA so has a multitude of things to play with. I am trying to distract myself by checking my mail, my calendar, but sitting there in a tissue vest made for a 6 year old and trying to keep it shut in front is just too much multitasking for me to handle. I reached over to fix the tissue sheet (we will get to that later) and tore the bottom glue spot out from under the right arm of my 'vest' - so now I just have a 12" long cape on - just flapping in the breeze...
The sheet - is supposed to cover everything else. Maybe if I was, again 6 years old. Take a piece of tissue you place in a gift bag double the length and there you have it - what is supposed to cover the entire bottom portion of my body. So, my thinking is, so as not to flash those opening the door and everyone in the hall - I will start on the right side - yeah - the upper flapping cape side, and tuck it behind me and use what ever I have left to cover the other side. I am tucking and feeling pretty good about myself when the thing ripped almost in half. By now I am deciding that they have seen women with no clothes on before, they probably rarely see them making confetti out of the only covering they were given and so I stopped while I was ... ahead? No ... most definitely behind - and I do mean behind.
They keep the rooms at about 65 degrees, I think just because they are masochistic and leave you in there, waiting for the REAL fun to begin for about 45 minutes - probably just to break your spirit. I think there is some sort of book on the subject because before this lapse in yearly appointments, I was a good girl, going yearly and no matter where I went - It always went the same - except some places had cloth coverings. As my lips were turning blue, I was dreaming about the cloth coverings with a flash or two (no pun intended) of 'do I have any duct tape in my purse?'. Next time, I am bringing my bathrobe and sitting in the chair until she walks in for the appointment. Seriously.
I played solitaire, but it was hard to move the itty bitty cards on my screen while shivering, so I gave up and did what I do - took photos:
Here are my feet turning blue and going numb since they are just hanging out there with the circulation getting cut off. I discovered quickly that camera phones are a tad lower in quality than my 10.1 mega pixel Digital SLR camera - but you can tell they are feet, right?
For people who do such a great service in bringing new life into this world, you would think that they could come up with a better, less humiliating way to give a yearly checkup.
Or is it just me?
5 comments:
Oh, Lori, you had me rolling off my chair laughing. You would think in Texas where everything is bigger that the tissue things would be too! Also, it is a lot warmer there - so the rooms should be warmer too, right? I did not have near as much fun as you did today - Steve's fish died today (his favorite, I might add), and I tried to kill the cat. Well, not really, but the net result would have been the same had Steve not heard her screeching, and gone to see why she was doing it. Seems that when I closed the garage door, she tried to slip in before it got to the bottom, and coming up from the angle of our driveway, she was lower than the so-called "safety" beam that is supposed to save the day and reopen the garage if something is in the way. It is a "so-called safety beam" because we have killed two cats with the garage door since we changed over to the new beam, and had killed 0 cats in all the years previously. I hope she is okay, she ran off in the dark backyard and probably has decided to run away, that is, if she is still running at all!
Lori: If you think women's wellness checks are bad, you ought to see what the men go through. On second thought you wouldn't want to see it. They don't issue tissue covers to men but allow us to use our arms and hands to cover anything we don't want seen by the nurse or doctor. And then when the prostate check comes along we merely jump to the floor and uncerimoniously drape ourselves over the end of the exam table with derriere exposed to the docs face and we use our hands to spread our cheeks wide. The doctor then snaps a latex glove on his right hand, dips his index finger into the jar of petroleum jelly, and goes to work by blindly prodding around in a place last seen by my proctologist. If the fact that there is no drape doesn't humble you, the prostate check will.
Dad
Thanks ever so much for that comment, Dad. Can you say OVERSHARE?
Of all the pictures you have posted, this one is my favorite!
-Sarah
Thanks to your dad, this is the first and only time I have ever felt sorrier for men.
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