Second Base

I'm a hypochondriac. Actually, I've never been officially diagnosed, but I show all the symptoms. Though sometimes I worry that this condition too is merely all in my head. My big fear is that I might have an unusually severe case of hypochondria, a rare form of the disease where I don't actually have hypochondria, but just think I have it. My body shivers at the thought. Yellow fever? Either way, it's good to be reminded once a year by certified physicians that I am not dying, or anyway, not faster than is natural for a person to die in the course of living, which is why I visited the Ob/Gyn yesterday for my annual exam and decided to have him give me the works.

Well, it was quite exciting. No one gives a breast cancer screening like my Dr. Palmer. On each of my visits he asks if I give myself routine checks in the shower, and I feign ignorance as to how to self-administer the feel-up, so that he has to show me again. I make my eyes wide and frightened, raise my arms above my head, and then let him go to second base. 

I'm going on my second month of celibacy (involuntary, of course; I can't seem to meet a man whom I can stand long enough to consider lying down for), so the speculum was a kind of nice, albeit "slightly cold," with "a little bit of pressure," reprieve. Mechanical, yes, but reminiscent of most of my long-term relationships in that way. Indeed, I nearly forgot myself in the moment and offered Dr. Palmer one of my go-to bedroom lines, a vocal remnant of my last long affair still ready on my tongue tip. My instincts activated by the equivalent of vaginal tripwire alerting me that the threshold's been breeched, I closed my eyes and found myself whispering in a voice I'd not used for some time, "Are you done yet?"

A glossary note for my male readers: The speculum is like salad tongs for the vagina, or rather, like that lifty thing one uses to change a tire. You use it to prop open the vagina so that you might gaze in—a frightening glimpse into the beginning of time! Gustave Courbet's painting of a woman spread similarly is thus called "The Origin of the World." Indeed, some scientists today suggest the birth of universes begins with the formations of black holes. A terrifying vortex is how I like to think of my vagina. When I spread my legs it is with all the awe and humility of one gazing at the night sky. 

But back: Lying there beneath the giant bar napkin Palmer had supplied me with—a paper sheath to safeguard my feminine modesty and also perhaps to shield me, Tarantino-style from whatever it is Palmer sees upon opening the magic briefcase between my legs—I asked him to give me all the tests. "The works, Dr. Palmer!" I said, waving my hand profligately from where I lay, as if I'd been sunning myself by the pool at a beach resort in Monte Carlo and were speaking to a waiter, requesting capriciously "why-not-another tiny umbrella with my drink!" I smiled and nodded to each disease screening he offered as if it were a serenade of drink specials he was reciting. I was about to get tested for everything you can imagine, when, like a rogue wave overflowing a swimming pool after some riffraff hotel crasher has inappropriately cannon-balled, the sober thought struck me: I have no insurance.

I put my knees back together prissily and questioned him about the prices. The thought of money put an immediate crimp in my mood. He politely offered, gentleman that he is, to sally down the hall where the lab was located. He returned after a moment, handing me a slip on which was printed an itemized register of tests and their respective prices. Had he only enclosed it in a leather case it might have passed for a wine list. I looked over the printout and was astonished to find the cost was something like $500 per venereal disease! I sniffed indignantly as if the wine I'd been given to taste were corky.

"I must think," I sat up abruptly, my former beach recliner feeling more and more like a cold slab.  "Take your time," he offered, informing me that the primary exam was actually over, that any of the screenings listed on the sheet could be made from the cultures he'd already taken, but for a few that required a blood test. The blood tests, if I chose them, he explained, would be administered by a nurse in the next office and would only require the prick of a brief inner elbow once I had dressed. 

Shutting the door behind him I was allowed a few moments to collect myself. I ripped the chintzy bar napkin from my body and reapplied my clothing with the swiftness of a hungover woman come to in a strange bed. Lost in thought, as I maneuvered the old one leg and then the other, I considered my options. Poking my head out the examining room door, I saw no one around, and so I padded down the carpeted hallway until I found myself in front of a room full of nurses, apparently on break. I kindly asked them to excuse my interruption and pointed to the print-out Dr. Palmer had given me, inquiring specifically as to what the relatively cheap $41.99 test sandwiched in the middle of my list of $500 tests actually tested for. (They were all listed in abbreviated codes, so that any layman's knowledge of terms like "the clap" one might possess offered no insight to the document's meaning. I showed them the piece of paper and pointed to the $41.99.

"Syphilis," one of them told me.

"Then syphilis it is!" I said enthusiastically.

Looking at the prices for herpes, HIV, and hepatitis they each agreed, "Wow! That's a lot of money." "No shit," I returned politely and went on that it seemed more prudent to wait until I pass out, give birth to a mutant baby, or at least show symptoms of some kind. "To hell with peace of mind," I told them. "These prices are insane!" So there, in my sordid binge of health I chose to get tested for syphilis in a manner not dissimilar to the way I choose my scotch at the liquor store—"I'll take the $19.99 please," I say pointing to the cheapest bottle, at the plastic jug of Teachers stacked perfectly against the wall. 

The off duty nurses examined my face for signs of delirium and/or jaundice. I explained that the crazed gleam in my eye was a regular fixture of my personality and not necessarily indicative of advanced v.d. They nodded finally and ultimately agreed with my prudence to pass on the remaining roster of tests. One of the nurses shepherded me into another room to draw my blood finally, and remarked, head shaking in moral disapproval, about my risky lifestyle, not with regard to the sex wrap-sheet clasped between my unmarried fingers, but at the financial promiscuity I exhibited by not having insurance. "You're playing with fire," she told me as if it were universally understood that in 21st century America, only the uninsured go to hell. She drew some blood and that was that.

I put my coat on and left. It was in the hallway as I followed the signs toward the building's exit that I began to feel somewhat foolish. Once removed from the immediate context of my earlier considerations, no longer horizontal but upright and clearheaded again as I made my way fully clothed out of the building and onto the blaring street, the spell all but broke. To tell you the truth, what a waste of money! I mean, sure, I hallucinate from time to time, but who doesn't? And anyway, that could be from any number of things, newly legal absinthe, lack of sleep, or any other of my various psychological disfigurements. Who's to say, really, that they are, in fact, syphilitic visions?

As I made my way further and further from the office, the hot paranoia that marked my earlier decision making began to dissipate, and I began to realize with each clicking footstep that my gynecologist had really screwed me this time. I thought about the unnecessary bill, a not too pretty penny. I didn't need to be tested for syphilis really. I could have just read Nieztche if I wanted to screen myself for it, I considered. If I found any of it at all discernable, identified myself with Zarathustra then I might consider a follow up appointment. I shook my head at my easily impressed mind, how it seemed I could be talked into anything. That fucking Palmer, I thought. 

The crux, though, please be patient with me, is that this also didn't seem exactly a bad thing either. On the contrary, allow me to explain. As I floated out among the waves of pedestrians climbing the avenues on their way to nowhere, bobbing along and reflecting on the stagnant waters of my recently undersexed life, the thought of what had just happened reached me like an echo from distant bed-shaking moments past, a soft ripple lapping at my shore suggestive of the turbulent yet exciting waters of the open sea. This was a gentle reminder of the rocky but spirited sex life I once enjoyed. Indeed, as I walked, I could not repress the smile that began involuntarily to spread across my now, I noticed, oddly contented face. You see, once again, I fondly recollected, I had spread my legs for a man (and let's not ignore the skillful second base action), and had left feeling foolish, tricked, and utterly used. Ah womanhood, ah romance. That sweet, blind bliss renewed!