It’s always joy to visit. It’s always joy to have a visitor they say. Either you are happy when they come or when they leave, they continue to say.
Well here is a visit am never happy to take, nor happy to leave, a visit to a gynecologist.
Growing up as a young woman, I was very timid. Very quiet and very shy. I always walked facing down only coming out of the house to go to church or to my father’s office to read. I think the most social place I went to was a market, and may be dances at school.
I never at any one point thought that the shy little woman would get a scenario where she has to open her legs for a stranger, all in the name of a gynecology checkup. For whatever reasons, mostly men are specialists in that field. Whether they join it out of curiosity, the one that killed the cat, it’s something that beats my understanding.
It all begins with even making an appointment. It’s already a journey to a torture world for me. By the time I get my insurance card to present it at the hospital reception, I already feel like a young man in imbalu season, ready to be slaughtered. The thought of a stranger touching my body gives me goose pimples.
Anyway, rude as the receptionist is, I brave their attitude, like the Uganda martyrs probably braved pain. I actually gnash my teeth; it’s already as if I am getting an injection.
Kelly , Kelly, they shout in the corridor. Hush hush. Not everyone must know I am seeing a gyn. I feel like first going in the opposite direction may be to other doors that are not marked GYENACOLOGY, may be dill dally until the other people waiting look the other side and I dash fast into the room but no, I have to brave the looks, tie my muscles like Golola Moses and walk in.
Good evening, the man in glasses says. I almost scream, “There is nothing good about this evening you man”!! But I hold my peace. This man is God. Look how he is going to order me to undress and I do it.remember he isn’t my boyfriend, and last time I checked, my boyfriend may have to first lie to me here and there, buy me flowers and chocolate, make me lose my mind to another world before I do the same thing. But look here this funny man telling me, without any grain of romance, REMOVE YOUR DRESS!!!
Okay, boss, dress, off. “ Remove your panties”. “Wait a minute, you mean I have to do that also”? I almost ask. But they say, if you have removed clothes, size doesn’t matter anymore. Oh that’s what bakiga say, fine fine. Like a nursery kid going for P.E, it goes down too.
OPEN YO LEGS!!! Wait a minute? I do what? I say in my mind. Slow motion brothers, slow motion. If I had an option at this time I would run to Afghanistan or Egypt. Am very sure I would have more peace there than on this dissection table. Suddenly I feel like the biology rat in the biology practical.
Any way, they say the humble go to heaven. Boss, my legs are open. But my heart, my eyes and my soul have to close at this particular juncture. In fact they have to die so that I think I am dead. I drift in another land. Pretend I am dead, he does his examination and probably after what feels like a millennium, he finally bellows “CLOSE YOUR LEGS”. At lightning speed I do. Same speed, I put on all garments, I feel like heading straight to the door and may be slide or escalate to my car.
Well another torture. He has to again tell me results I hear. How can I even look at this nigga that has effortlessly seen what I was born like? I don’t even know so well myself; I don’t think I can enter that far to know. Whatever perception he has held of me, I will never know.
After a long spell of words that feel like the devil giving directions in purgatory, he finally finishes his unnecessary speech, writes in Arabic and directs me to go to the pharmacy. I carry the paper with both hands, it can’t fall. In fact am about to put it in the bra like the way an old woman keep money. What if the wind blows it? What if it falls and I have to go to that table again?
I open the door with glee. As if I have just come from London and am at the airport the first arrival. Phewwww, the storm is over. I rush fast from this place, peep a little and look at all the women lining to see this man. One funny thing that crosses my mind is will he tell all these women to also open their legs?
Ahhhhhhaaaa, I shrug my head. Funny profession this is. But why aren’t there women doing it. Please save us, young girls. Enroll, for this course, I am now pleading.
SAVE ME FROM THE TORTURE. The visit to the gynecologist will always be my longest and most dreaded visit, LIKE EVER!!!
KigeziDiva 