A Date with a Bottlebrush: My Most Recent Pap

She wasn’t a doctor — not really. She was “just” a physician’s assistant. But my doctor had left — again. I think I’ve gone through about four at this office already, a different one almost every year.

By CC Staff

This one was young and pretty. That surprised me. I don’t know, maybe I never considered that young women my age would want to examine other young women’s cervixes? I felt like I should have been chatting with her over coffee about our latest loves, not sitting in a cold examination room, draped in a thin cotton sheet and discussing my vagina’s history in exacting detail.

“I’ll have you lie back now,” she said when we had finished talking.

She came around the table and unsnapped the sheet. “My hands are cold,” she warned.

Oy. She wasn’t kidding. Cold fingers don’t feel any better on your breasts than they do inside your vagina.

While she performed the breast exam, I noticed she carefully avoided my eyes. Maybe she found the age thing as uncomfortable as I did. So I did the only thing I could think of: I struck up a conversation.

Trying to sustain small talk with a young, pretty doctor who has her cold hands on your boobs is not as easy as it might seem. I have no clue now what we talked about, in fact. I’m not sure I would want to know.

After the breast exam she asked me to scoot down and put my heels in the stirrups. Somehow we got to talking about how inconvenient this part of the exam is.

“Patients always tell me that a man had to have invented this,” she said cheerfully. “And they’re right, a man did invent it. But really, I don’t think there would be any other way to do it.”

She had a point. My mind flipped through all of the possible positions in which someone could examine a woman’s vagina without a table and stirrups. They were all X-rated.

Somehow, I don’t think that would ease the embarrassment any.

The rest of the exam went pretty quickly. She was fast and efficient, which is good because I’m usually a wiggler. I once had a doctor tell me that we shouldn’t be able to feel it when they scrape our cervixes with a bottlebrush.

I don’t know about you, but I definitely feel it. I rather suspect that rumor was the work of a man as well. Maybe there wouldn’t be any other good way to examine a woman’s cervix, but whoever thought of insensitive cervixes was WAY off base.

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