A hike at Mile 16 of Pike’s Peak is all fun and hypoxia until your youngest daughter has to go to the bathroom, and you realize the only option (besides finding a suitable rock–not advised) is a porta potty. I’ve been to enough truly horrifying bathrooms in my travels that I can usually just close my eyes–okay squint; closing them would be dangerous–and take care of what needs to be done. But for Annalee, there is no terror quite like the ones held in those four plastic walls.
She had just turned six that summer when we visited Colorado shortly before our return to Korea. We parked in the giant lot, unable to drive further because of an event happening at the summit and had just finished hiking a two-mile loop when she announced she had to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, there was a long row of tan-walled porta potties blocking off one corner of the parking lot—which, by the way, was absolutely crammed with cars, this being a gorgeous Saturday morning in early June. As we approached, she changed her mind.
“I don’t actually need to go,” she said as she danced with her knees close together.
“Yes, you do,” I told her.
“Okay, yeah, but I don’t like going in those.”
“I know, but that's all we’ve got.”
I was holding her hand, and I won’t say I pulled her in but… kind of. We locked the door and looked around, and without going into the gory details, I’ll just say it wasn’t that bad. Trust me, I’ve seen worse. But when Annalee caught a glimpse of the inside of the toilet, she screamed like someone was coming after her with a knife.
“Annalee! Calm down!” I said, caught off-guard by the very real terror in her screams. She threw open the door so hard that it banged against the adjacent porta-potty, which must have been heart-stopping for whoever was in there. Then she raced away, faster than I’d ever seen her move in her life, her shrieks echoing over the peaks of the entire Rocky Mountain range. Lucky for all of us, everyone in the jam-packed parking lot that day was a certified Good Person™️ who would not abide the screams of a child without some investigation.
“What’s going on over there?” I heard someone ask.
“Oh my goodness, what’s happening?”
“Is that girl okay?”
“Hey, little girl! Are you alright?”
I wished for Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility but also had to prove I was nothing more than a benevolent mother with only the best intentions. “My daughter is fine!” I insisted. “She just…” I couldn’t help but start to laugh, “hates the porta-potty.”
With some distance between herself and her worst nightmare, a little sense returned and Annalee quieted. A large man with a trim, snowy-white beard wearing a t-shirt pulled tight over a round belly was closest to us. It seemed a real possibility that he was Santa Claus on summer holidays.
“Is that true?” he asked Annalee in a deep baritone, and I wondered if he’d ask what she wanted for Christmas next. She nodded quietly at him, all pout and puppy eyes. “Well,” he said, “can’t say I blame you there! I feel the same! But sometimes, you know, you’ve just gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”
I recalled this scene one recent day as I dialed the number for the gynecologist into my phone. It was definitely time to do what I had to do. To be fair, there was the pandemic (yes, I’m ashamed to admit it was that long) and a few moves. Also, my last appointment was with a doctor who had quite possibly the worst bedside manner I’ve ever experienced, and left me traumatized1. Also, going to the gynecologist just isn’t fun, and it’s easy to find a thousand other things to fill your calendar.
I’ve taken the kids to an American clinic nearby, but they don’t do Paps or mammograms. They do, however, give business cards for an OBGYN clinic that stayed tucked safely into my wallet for a couple months. Finally, though, I had to be a grown-up and call.
“We just had a cancellation,” the woman on the phone told me. “Can you come in Wednesday morning at 8:30?” Hmmm, could I? Twenty-four years of motherhood has conditioned me to not make appointments before 9 am unless an absolute emergency because kids plus waking up equals slow. But they’d be at school by then, and I knew if I said no, I would lose the nerve to go for another couple months.
“Sure,” I said with as much confidence I could scrape together.
It’s a new era of my life because I was actually on time and showered as I stood at the reception desk of the clinic. (No makeup though, so there’s room for improvement.)
“Guten Morgen!" I said in a friendly tone. Big mistake. The receptionist replied with a smile followed by a head spinning torrent of German. I dealt with the language barrier during most of our medical experiences in Korea, but I hadn’t factored that into the equation of things that might make this day awkward, especially after the woman on the phone spoke English so well. My mind blanked. Did I even know the German word for “face” yet?
“Ahhh….Sprachen Sie Englisch?” I held my breath.
“Oh, yes. I was asking…” She could sprachen Englisch perfectly and handed me a stack of forms. I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
A few minutes later, I followed a nurse down the hall to an examination room where the doctor sat behind a large desk with hands folded. He was friendly enough, and spoke English well enough, and we talked for a few minutes until it was time for the actual exam. Everything was fine, just fine. I’m well into adulthood now. I could do this.
Then he said, “Here in Germany, we do things a little differently than in America.” I froze. “We don’t use gowns.” Oh no! “You just take off the clothes from your waist down. We can give you a blanket if you’d like. Would you like a blanket?”
I’ve had five babies. During three of those pregnancies I moved–twice across the country and once across the Atlantic Ocean. Then there are all the doctors I’ve seen just for this reason who were never the same doctors that delivered my babies, so I’d done this a lot. I’m not typically shy or prudish. I didn’t have any reason to feel awkward.
So why did I?
I looked around the large examination room as if it held the answer to my question. We were at the desk, which took up one corner. In the corner to my left, there was an exam table covered in paper. The corner diagonal to us had…I don’t know what to call it. A bed? A chair? Some kind of gym equipment? It was a Frankenstein-like mess of all three with the head of an ambulance stretcher, but bent like a dentist chair except without much of anything to actually sit on and a crescent cut out of that. Instead of armrests, there were large metal semi-circles on either side, and then stirrups floated in the air high above the seat. It was the kind of thing that would be well-suited for giving birth, but I was definitely not having a baby that day.
“Please, God,” I prayed silently, “don’t make me have to figure that thing out.”
The last corner, behind me, was curtained off so I could disrobe privately. (Can we take a moment to ponder this absurdity? Thank you.) And here, I realized, was the problem. If I didn’t take the blanket, I would have to walk across this rather expansive room in only my slightly-cropped tank top, like Donald Duck or Winnie-the-Pooh.
There’s so much I do in my day-to-day life that kind of scares the pants off me because of the vulnerability required, no matter how many times I’ve done it. Asking “Can I sit here?” in dozens of different settings. Introducing myself over and over and over again. Writing and clicking “Submit” or “Publish” because I have this insatiable drive to create with words and tell stories. Please say yes. Please don’t think I’m too weird. Please like it. Please, please, please.
But the prospect of walking across the room exactly this way was too much like the stuff straight out of nightmares, the kind where you look down and realize you forgot half your clothes.
I drew the line.
“Um… yes, please, I’ll take the blanket.” He spoke to the nurse in German, and thankfully I don’t know if she rolled her eyes because my back was to her. She returned quickly with the blanket, and I went into the corner behind the curtain. A few moments later, I opened the curtain, my lower half swathed in the blanket, feeling like a game show contestant, waiting to be told which corner to go to.
“Okay, please sit in the chair,” the doctor instructed. I took a step back toward the chair at his desk, albeit slightly puzzled. “That one.” He pointed to the Frankenstein chair.
No. NO. NO!!
Ugh.
*Sigh.*
So here’s the other thing about that “chair.” The “seat” was level with my ribs. I know German women tend to be tall, but I haven’t seen any who are that tall. And I’m 5’6” which isn’t that short. How was I supposed to get up there and perch on the lack of an actual seat in this so-called chair with my legs in the stirrups? I calculated my next move, wishing I knew kung fu. But also, my lower half was swathed in the heavy blanket. Bruce Lee never made a movie dressed like I was right then. He couldn’t. It would have been terrible.
I shuffled slowly across the cold floor in my bare feet as if walking to the guillotine, very self-consciously tugging the blanket tight around me. I asked myself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” and then answered my own question, “The worst? Easy. The doctor or nurse could laugh at me.” Nothing, I was sure, would make my soul curl up and die quite like my gynecologist laughing at me.
Captain Barnacles of The Octonauts said, “You can’t be brave if you’re not scared.” Carrie Fisher said, “Stay scared, but do it anyway.” So I, in a tiny voice, said, “Um, how do I get up there?”
Because I’ve never before gone to the gynecologist and wondered, Am I athletic enough for this?
It turned out there was a button to lower the “chair,” like on hospital beds or at the dentist. I don’t know if the nurse ran into the exam room after hearing my exchange at the front desk and said to the doctor, “We’ve got an American! Let’s stress her out!” before setting it up that way.
But the nurse laughed, and then the doctor joined in. And it would have been mortifying except for one thing: I laughed first. And I’ve never laughed, especially that hard, at the gynecologist.
P.S. It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month for one more day, so consider this your friendly reminder to get a mammogram if it’s time! It probably won’t go worse than my trip to the gynecologist, and if somehow it does, at least you’re in good company!
No, actually. Not going to go into it here, but the few people I’ve told the story to were appropriately shocked.
“Because I’ve never before gone to the gynecologist and wondered, Am I athletic enough for this?” 😆 This all sounds so awkward, Joy, but you handled it like a champ!
They have the same "chair" (come on, it's not a chair) in Spain and I almost fell off of it when I slid down and missed the stool for my feet at the end of my exam (so, still pantsless). But they didn't laugh at me because Spanish people in authority have no sense of humor, they reprimanded me for not being careful on my dismount! Europeans have no shame. It is one of my favorite things about them, honestly. But they love to make people feel ashamed. We haven't been to the dentist in ages and I keep putting it off more because I don't want to be shamed.