The Bad Exam

It was an awkward eight blocks. Almost as awkward as it is to write this. The blocks themselves were the same as they always were, but I was feeling awkward to the extreme. It had all started a week earlier.

I had been having some mild pains, internal pains, way low down in my torso. Pain down deep inside, under the belt, in an area where many of the internal organs like to hang out. It had started out subtle enough and I did what I usually do, which is to let it slide and hope it goes away. But I went out of town for the weekend and by Sunday the pain was pretty pronounced, very uncomfortable and a little alarming. I’m still a pretty young guy but I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m at the age where, while it's still somewhat rare and surprising when it happens, people do sometimes get fatal stuff. I didn’t want to be one of those guys.

So Monday morning, back in the city, I called my doctor and made an appointment. The earliest they could fit me in was Tuesday afternoon, so I waited and tried not to worry too much, and actually started to feel better wile I waited for my appointment. By Tuesday afternoon the pain was dull and rare enough that I was almost glad to feel pang of it. I didn't want to be the guy who takes his car in to the mechanic and have it stop making the noise as soon as the hood is up.

The doc had me disrobe and looked me over. "do you feel soreness here? Does this hurt?" The answers were no. "Okay, I'm going to need you to lie on your side and pull your knees up to your chest." These are not words you want to hear. And if there was any doubt that my day was not about to improve, he finished his sentence with "I'm going to check your prostate. For better or worse."

If anyone in the world doesn't already know this, the prostate is a little gland in the male body that produces the fluid that sperm swim in when a man ejaculates and also controls the release of urine from the bladder. It is positioned near the rectum, making the most convenient, non surgical way to access it through the anus. Yes, to check the prostate you have to go in through the service entrance.

Now, it is a bold new era. The sexual revolution brought in quantity but the more responsible era that followed showed a need for quality. Countless books have been written on ways to improve the pleasurable aspects of the sexual act. Somewhere along the line someone figured out that gentle manipulation of the prostate can be pleasurable, particularly at orgasm. The authors of these books were likely doing their research in more intimate and passionate settings. I can only assume it was done a little more slowly as well.

On my side on the table I heard the sound of latex glove being pulled onto hand and I mentally braced myself. I was not prepared. One minute I’m alone on the table and the next… there's the doc. Looking back, words fail me to describe he experience. The best term I can come up with is “foreign”. There was definitely something there that didn't belong there. Something that, frankly, didn't fit very well.

Now the timing of this couldn't be worse either. I mentioned that I was out of town the previous weekend. I had been visiting with some friends and I had been teasing one of them mercilessly because he had a doctor who prescribed pretty much everything is suppository form. He eventually stopped going to his doctor as he became aware that most people do not take ninety percent of their medications up their ass.

So while we were teasing him, mercilessly, I might add, coming up with scenarios in which his erstwhile doctor would grind up over the counter medications in order to insert them in his rectum, he countered back. "Do you mean to tell me that you've never had a doctor put anything in your ass?”

"Not so much as a thermometer," I replied truthfully. Ah, those were the days

I guess fate is cruel and not without its sense of irony. Here I was just about a hundred hours later with a man's finger boldly going where no man had gone before.

"Do you feel pressure but no pain?" he was asking. Who was pulling my hair? It was me. Grabbing on to something for dear life i had chosen the top of my own head. "Pressure but no pain?"

"Yes, yes, correct, no pain" my hurried answer. The finger was removed though my nerve endings were not quick to forget. Like an echo of thunder rolling over the hills. In my butt.

"Well your prostate isn't swollen. I think this might be a muscular thing. Why don't you get dressed and meet me in my office” Yeah, then I’m going out for a beer and a steak and a twenty dollar Thai hooker.

Well, if you're concerned about my health, and I hope you are, let me say that i seem to be fine. He told me to take a week off of karate and see if it gets better. I did and it did. But if you'll cast your mind back to the beginning of this writing, I wasn't complaining of lying on a table and being penetrated. It was the walk home that really caused my tears. While I was very thankful for an abundance of lubrication during those few vulnerable seconds on the table, the charm of it had worn off by a half a block of walking. It was slippery back there. Eight long, slippery blocks back to my apartment and my blessed roll of toilet paper.

So what is the moral to this story? I don’t think there is one. I wish there was. I wish I came away from my afternoon of orifice exploration with some new wisdom or some pithy observation or even just a good punchline. I have my health and that’s a good thing. With luck I’ll live to be old enough to need those exams on a regular basis. KY has a warming gel now, maybe by then they’ll have a dignity gel to go with it.

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