Warning to readers: explicit material ahead!

January seems to be sex month at the College of Medicine in Rockford. First we learned about the male exam. Now we are learning the female pelvic exam and taking a sexual history. So, just wanted to let you know ahead of time that many of my posts for the next couple of weeks will reflect sex month.

The other day we had our instructor for the pelvic exam come in and orient us to this section and teach us about what we are supposed to be doing before the actually let us do it. She first just explains to us in words what we'll be doing. I can tell this is going to be interesting because some of the guys are a little red already. Especially at the point where she explains that the cervix feels sort of like the tip of your nose and then proceeds to tell the girls that we should practice finding it on ourselves (How many of you just pushed on the tip of your nose?). She then explains that we will be performing a teaching pelvic exam where the women have mirrors and are able to watch part of the exam if they want. She then said, "I know many of you may be like who would want to do that? But think about it, how many of you women know what your genitalia look like?" She then pauses. We're like are we supposed to answer that? No one volunteered. I do understand what she is saying though. Many women were taught that they should be ashamed of their "private parts" and not touch and/or look at them. This is a little ridiculous. Why should you allow a doctor or your partner to see/touch a part of you that you haven't seen? At this point I am reminded of last year when we learned the pelvic anatomy (for more details, see my Feb. 16, 2005 post). Some of the guys didn't realize that women had more than one "hole." They thought we urinated from our vaginal opening. I don't know how they thought that would work. Where did they think that opening led to? All I could think about is damn, bladder control would be a major issue if the opening was that big. It wouldn't come out in a stream it would be more like just a gush. Anyway, so then she proceeds to the movie part of the presentation. We are warned that this is a homemade movie so it hasn't been edited. Homemade? Who makes a home movie of their pelvic exam? Well, we soon discover what she meant by it not being edited. At one point during the "movie" when the doctor is showing the patient her cervix with the mirror, she says and I kid you not, "See that part there with the opening? That is your cervix. If we were tiny little men, we could walk right through there and get into your uterus." If that isn't a nice visual for you all...

Well, I'll stop for now and leave you hanging. Stay tuned, in a couple of days I'll write about my experience taking a medical history. And coming in two weeks, my first pelvic exam (one that I perform, not receive. sorry about that).

Scoop, squeeze and pull

Where do I begin? I have so many things to you all about that I don't know where to start. Well, I think I'll just go day by day.

Saturday: This was THE day. That's right, I finally did my male genital/rectal exams. Let me preface this by saying that the workshop was really helpful and I learned a lot from it. That being said, it was so unrealistic. So, here's how it worked. We were split into groups of 2-3 and rotated to 4 stations. At each station we were all to preform some/all of the exam. Okay, so that is all we were told. In the first room, my group walked in and sat down to wait for the "patient" to arrive. Said patient enters, proceeds to pull out his own personal lube, squeeze out three globs of it and then drops his pants. Okie, dokie. He then tells us that we will all be "isolating his testicles" and doing a rectal exam on him. Isolating his testicles? That doesn't sound pleasant. He then demonstrates, on himself, the "scissor method." Here's his instructions, and I quote, "Use your left hand to scoop the testicle and make a scissor-like motion with your right to push excess skin down and pull the testicle away from the penis." Okay, I know I don't have many men reading this, but come on. Doesn't it make you cringe to think of a scissor maneuver and testicles? Then we proceed to the rectal exam. All goes well until we starts having a discussion with me while my finger is still in his butt. At one point I'm like, "Would you like me to remove my finger?" "Oh no," he says, "go ahead and feel around." When we enter the next room, we walk in to see an old man sitting on a stool with no pants/underwear on reading a newpaper and drinking coffee. Just like it is completely normal to have a roomful of people see you without clothes. This room was the "genital exam" room. It went off without a hitch except for when he asked me to clip my fingernails. The next two stations we were supposed to just do the whole exam from start to finish. These mock exams were a little unrealistic in that the men were giving us pointers on whether or not we were feeling their prostate and how to maneuver their testicles. All and all though and interesting way to spend a Saturday morning. I joke about it, but really it is pretty nice that these guys volunteered for this so that I wasn't practicing all of this for the first time on a real patient.

Sunday: Not much too exciting. Did buy a new painting for my living room. It was originally going to go in the bedroom, but when I got it home it just looked better in the living room. Now my living room smells like canvas/paint/wood. It's interesting, I never really thought about the fact that I would be able to smell the canvas like that having it hanging over the couch. It's not a bad odor though.

Monday: Well, it's now that I think about what I was going to say about Monday it sounds a little silly but here goes. There's this person in my class who basically had a nervous breakdown and is going through a lot of emotional problems. S/he is extremely quiet and not very good with people and not sure that medical school is what s/he wants to do. So I've been talking to him/her about it. Basically, s/he wants the psychiatrist to tell them exactly how to be more confident and outgoing and give him/her drugs to make them feel better. I told M (that's much easier) that wasn't realistic. That right now it's more important to get through this crisis and then work on social and communication skills. I also said some other stuff but won't bore you with that. After seeing the psychiatrist M said they told her exactly what I had said. I guess my point is that this is making me think that I am good at this and should go into psychiatry? I'm still not sure but this is the "specialty of the week" for me now.

Tuesday: I finally break 100 in my bowling league. I know, that isn't that great but it is very exciting for me. I bowled by best game ever.

Today: Practiced acupunture on each other. It was actually kind of neat. I could really feel heat where the needles were placed. It's funny how the Chinese seem at first to go against all of Western medical teachings but they really work in some cases. I think people are too quick to reject alternative medicines.

I'll stop here before I ramble on too much.

Jane Fonda I am not

Man I am hungry. This whole eating better and working out shit sucks. Not that I am starving myself or anything here. Really, it's all in my twisted little head. See, I normally wouldn't want to eat anything at 10:45am, but the fact that I can't makes me want to. It's like when your parents tell you that smoking is disgusting but you do it anyway (even if you aren't interested in it) just to spite them. Well, something like that is going on with me. Except it's my stomach messing with my brain. The working out thing isn't really a big deal. I was doing pretty good with it last year until about the time I started dating E. Then we just sat on our butts. Well, sort of.

Anyway, I gradually just stopped going so I'm going to start again because I have no excuse now. Plus, I figured I'd start lifting weights. Hmm, that was really interesting. First off, I probably haven't lifted weights since high school so my muscles are understandably a bit weak. The first machine I sat down at was biceps curls. I had no idea how much weight to put on there so I just moved the peg down 4 thinking that I'm not strong but surely I'm not that weak. Well, I went to pick that thing up. Holy cow, I thought my wrist were going to break off. It's really quite sad. Later, a "real" weightlifter mentioned to me that the machine I used was actually one of the harder ones. Whatever that means. But I guess it does make me feel better.

What doesn't make me feel better is that when this rather large woman (think 450-500lb) and her friend came in they looked at me and gave me the look. Then large woman turns to friend and whispers (rather loudly) "At least I'm not the only big woman in here." Umm, was she referring to me. I mean, I'm no skinny girl by any means, but I sure as hell wouldn't put myself in the same category as a 500lb woman. So me being the evil person I am decided to follow the same circuit as her and loudly add more weights to each machine to show her that I am clearly in better shape than her. Sad I know, but admit it. We all do that no matter how big we are we always look around the room and see who is fatter than us to make us feel better. I'm just a little tired of being that person. I guess I am doing my part by raising others' self-esteem though.

Happy New Year

Despite feeling a little under the weather, I had a great time ringing in the new year. Much better than previous years where I rarely made it 'til midnight. I have been a hermit since I got home yesterday morning though. I just got my voice back a little this afternoon. I went out to get some things from the store and the lady checking me out couldn't understand me so I guess it's not 100%. I haven't felt bad, just can't talk. If you know me, you know that this is driving me crazy.

I don't usually do this, but I thought that I would make some resolutions this year. We'll see if it works better to write them down.

1. Pay all of my bills on time.
2. Keep checkbook balanced so as not to overdraw multiple months in a row like last year (yeah, I suck at that).
3. Pay off my credit card debt (I probably won't get it all paid off, but at least don't make it worse).
4. Make fewer impulse purchases.
5. Exercise three times a week and don't make silly excuses like I'm too busy studying.
6. Use my study time more efficiently.
7. Find a hobby. Yeah, I know it's sad that I don't have one.
8. Read 2-3 books a month that have nothing to do with medicine.
9. Go through my clothes and throw out ones that don't fit or I never wear.
10. (Stolen from K)Go on three dates. This I did last year but I don't want to get back into a slump again.
11. Make at least 2 new friends.
12. Do something for myself once a week.

I start with just a dozen. I didn't realize there were so many things I would like to improve. I could just keep going with the list but I'll stop now. Just by looking at this list I think people could figure out a lot about me.