Open mouth, insert speculum...I mean foot

When you get right down to it I do feel a little bit sorry for my doctors.  They've been nice people, all of them, well intentioned and caring, but let any one of them utter a single phrase that is less than exquisitely calibrated and I go all lucha libre on their competent white-coated asses.

But only in my head.  In person, I am almost faultlessly courteous.  (I only add "almost" because I know I've allowed myself the odd impolite guffaw here and there.  It's usually been immediately after I've been asked if I'm aware of the risk of high-order multiples, or prodded for a decision about how to handle any leftover embryos.  I excuse myself this lapse in manners only because I think those doctors have been in on the joke, having seen my ovaries in action.  Uh, in inaction.)

Lovely people, all.  If they have occasionally made a gaffe, it has usually been a mild one, kindly meant and easily forgiven.  (Usually.  I make an exception for the doctor I'd asked for birth control pills, who actually leaned in close and whispered, swear to God, "Just in case, or is there someone whispering in your ear?")  Some of them have even been people I think I'd have liked to be friends with, like the long-ago gynecologist who looked at my piercings, regretfully told me I'd have to remove them for my laparoscopy, and then reminisced wistfully about her college days, when she'd had a mohawk and a lip ring.

Believe me, I recognize my great good luck in this and appreciate it, especially having heard some real lulus from some real bozos.  A friend inside the computer pointed out Radar's "Gynecologists Say the Darnedest Things," a list of some of the creepiest things their readers have heard from a professional head tucked between their thighs.  And indeed some of them are weird.  But in my opinion they're nowhere near as cringeworthy as what a doctor, male, said to a friend of mine just before injecting the dye during her HSG: "Let's see if your insides are as pretty as your outside."

The comments at Jezebel about the Radar story are every bit as unsettling and, in places, hilarious: "My doctor once shouted, 'Wow, you are LUCKY! You're really tilted but in a good way. He must not have to work very hard at all!'"  "I mentioned my mother was a dentist. The gyno looks up from between my legs with a disgusted look on her face and says: 'You know, I could never do that. Looking into people's filthy mouths all day long...Ugh!'"  "Mine always tells me to say hi to my dad. Yeah. Awkward."  "The weirdest thing I've had happen after I had an exam was for the doctor to pat me afterwards, right on my mons pubis.  Like he was patting a puppy. A cute vagina puppy."

Woof.

Now I happen to think that given the, ah, emotionally charged nature of fertility treatment, plenty of you must have heard funnier, creepier, or both.  Feel like sharing?  If it makes you feel more relaxed, imagine me complimenting the sweet ballerina pink of your cervix as you type.

I LOVE JUSTINE ELIAS for the link.