Bus ride To nazca - Michael Waite

Obstetrician/Gynecologist

With your feet in the stirrups at the OB/GYN, you reach a new level of embarrassment. Your legs are completely spread – an extent to which I’m sure no Catholic nuns approve of, regardless of the medical reason – and a person’s head is located approximately at your knees. To make matters even worse in my situation, my gynecologist was what I like to call elbowdeep inside of me. She was looking for a “micro tear,” the supposed cause for my dyspareunia, a fancy word for painful sexual intercourse. The doctor attempted to find this tear by inserting multiple fingers inside of me and pushing around as if a micro tear will appear like braille on the walls of my vagina. Though, I’m not a doctor so maybe that’s exactly how it goes.

In order to find this micro tear more efficiently, the aggressive doctor asked me how the pain felt and where it was located. I hated this question – and still do – because pain is pain, especially when it comes to parts that are inside of you. At the time I didn’t even know what I had eaten for breakfast, so I was even less likely to know exactly where this pain was located.

“The right side?” I ventured, trying to think back three weeks, to the last time I had had sex. Her hands reached even farther and pushed, to no avail. She pulled out her gloved hands, as if they hadn’t been inside of me for the past half an hour and shook her head.

“I don’t feel anything,” she said, her voice seeming to chastise me for being a wimp on the sexual pain factor.

“Well something is there,” I insisted, forcing her to once more penetrate me while I laid back on that crinkly white paper at all doctors’ offices. To me it felt like the cheap toilet paper at public schools and I wondered idly at the time if they had the same supplier. A supplier whose life goal was to make the most uncomfortable people – patients and public school students – even more uncomfortable when they were either ass-up on a table or wiping their ass in a bathroom stall. Above my wide-spread knees my doctor looked up in triumph.

“Aha!”