I remember going to doctors occasionally with my mom when I was young. It was fascinating to see the moment the needle pierces the skin, to see the feet of the phlebotomist or nurse shuffle but their hands stay still while they undid the tourniquet and blood began to fill the large syringe. Later they'd pull the needle out quickly and smack a cotton ball onto the skin. My mom's pale fingers would close over the cotton ball and they seemed to lift her arm above her head. I remember seeing a centrifuge for the first time, and I remember—later, after a few surgeries—helping her clean her wounds with a saline rinse if my dad wasn't there to do it. I remember seeing a large, raw scar and a drain site on her half-flattened chest.
But I do not remember the gynecologist's office because—thankfully—that was the one place where I had to wait in the children's play room, the one with the four-foot ceiling and ugly murals on the walls where all the books were about Dick and Jane but I didn't care about Dick and Jane because I'd already read them all, read them all by age 5, or, at most, 6, and I was onto bigger and better books: the Boxcar Kids, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Drew, Time and Newsweek and National Geographic....(if only for the pictures).
Not going to the gynecologist didn't spare me from learning what those doctors do and see everyday, but only in a clinical, distant sense. One of the things about growing up in a medical household is the utter absence of any personal medical privacy; another thing is the educational opportunity afforded to my parents to impress upon we the children the dire horrors of sexually transmitted diseases and the accompanying amoral values. Nevertheless, my father, who gave us our school physicals and flu shots and stitched our wounds and delivered us from our mother and looked at every rash, scrape, bump, or other miscellaneous abrasion that our mother couldn't diagnose—nevertheless, he is not and was never a gynecologist and so that one thing was the one bit of privacy I was afforded. They could harp and sing and talk about the dangers/horrors/diseases of the genital area, but that was all they could do. And while most of their remonstrations about my health and hopeful asexuality worked, there's been a bit of a kneejerk, backhand outcome:
So now I'm 25 years old, have never been to a gyncologist, and am apoplectically terrified of ever going.
***
True family story:
My great grandmother fell getting out of her shower one day. Great grandfather called my grandmother, who lived next door, for help. When she came, he was waiting for her in the living room.
"Is she okay?" Grandmother asked.
"Don't know," Great grandfather replied.
"You don't know?"
"Well she's kind of moaning but she said she just hurts a lot."
"How did she fall?"
"Don't know."
"Eh?"
As it turned out, they'd had 11 kids but he'd never seen her naked and wasn't about to go into the bathroom and change 50 years of ignorance.
