You know it’s going to be a bad afternoon when a female physician with decent-looking fingernails introduces herself with a firm handshake and then, just minutes later, says, “I’ve got a hunch it’s your prostate.”
“Do you have any other symptoms?” the nurse practitioner asked, as if having to pack a burning 16-pound testicle in ice and carry the thing around in a sling wasn’t awful enough to warrant a few hundred million units of penicillin with no other questions asked.
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“You better get right down here this minute,” she said, convincing me that I ought to quickly sell all my possessions and move to some paradise island like Tonga to live out the remaining few days of my wretched life. “When a man in your age group has the sort of problems you’re describing, we don’t take any chances.”
On this day, I was led to a treatment room and left there to read the HMO’s “Patient’s Bill of Rights,” which regrettably said nothing about being entitled to a shot of Demerol if I convinced the nurse coming in to take my vital signs that it felt as if someone had mistaken my ballocks for marshmallows and cooked them over a camp fire. The pain grew increasingly worse, so when a young woman in a white coat walked in and introduced herself as my doctor, then asked me to describe my problem, I knew I had to be entirely truthful. “No problem at all,” I said, wondering why my first-ever encounter with a female physician couldn’t have been for something like bunions. “Forgive me for wasting your time. I feel just fine now.”
Unfortunately, after she’d juggled the cannonball for a couple of minutes the diagnosis proved inconclusive, which meant a second opinion was required. So after a colleague came in and did some juggling of his own, I got to nonchalantly stand there in the middle of the room with my arms crossed and my pants around my ankles and listen in while two strangers discussed the state of my testicles. Not strangled, it was finally decided, but definitely gamy.
As it turned out, the gaminess was just a side effect of the infection, which still had to be located. We’ll need a urine sample, I was told, and after that it’s party time.
All that remained was a test for chlamydia, which is a relatively minor procedure that involves cramming something the size of a shish kebab skewer just far enough into your urethra that it grazes your spine. When I realized what was going to happen I got so nervous that my body got cold and rigid and began to shrivel, so when she put some sort of coal-miner-type light and magnifier around her head I figured it wasn’t to look for signs of the infection, it was to look for my johnson, which had shrunk so much it was probably no longer visible to the naked eye. Be calm, I kept telling myself; just be calm and the thing will unfurl, thereby sparing me this last, horrendous bit of humiliation. But trying to be calm when someone is heading for your penis with a fencing foil is no easy matter. Sensing my anxiety as the sword was inserted, my doctor counseled me to count aloud to ten. I willingly complied, but by the time I got up around 60 I realized I’d been had.
