Things started off on the right foot. They had a walker and a chilled Ensure waiting for me. Then the doctor opened the door. She was dressed in platform shoes and a Go-Go dress, like this
“Hi, sweetie!” she said.
I looked around. Surely she could not be talking to me. One cannot be dubbed “advanced” and referred to as “sweetie.” The terms are diametrically opposed. Kind of like “happy” and “Mulletville” are.
She ushered me into the exam room. Then she roller-derbied the shit out of my stomach.
“This kid is stubborn!” she shouted. “It won’t move!” She plugged in the audio. “Oh, good. We have a heartbeat.”
Nothing like shooting a lightening bolt of fear into a women who’s had a miscarriage. I started to hate her.
She called for reinforcements—I thought to help navigate the machine but instead she wanted to bitch about her job. “Where’d Dr. X go this afternoon? Golfing?” she growled to Nurse A. “And when do we get paid? I don’t know if I can make it on this salary—”
“—Excuse me,” I mumbled. “Could you pay attention? You’re rolling over my breast, not my stomach.”
“Sorry, honey!”
Before I tell you what happened next, I need to tell you a quick side story. When I was in high school, there was a boy whose last name was Vaginitis or Vagisnuffleupagus—something awful like that—so his friends gave him the nickname “Vag.”
Nothing beat hearing “Yo, Vag! VAG!” as you made your way to class. Ironically, his social standing actually increased, perhaps because people assumed that someone nicknamed Vag was getting laid a lot. Some days I actually envied his nickname. People thought I was Amish. Being called Vag might have been good for me, too.
Or maybe not. Maybe they would have assumed I had elephantiasis of the labia.
Anyway, after turning my stomach black and blue without achieving the results she was looking for, the doctor wiped her brow and said, “Hike up your skirt, hon. I’m going to have to vag you.” (As in vaginal ultrasound me. For any of Chuck’s male friends who might be reading this, I’m sorry if you just threw up your lunch.)
And of course, after I thought, “Ewwww. Vag me?”, I thought of good ole Vag. I wondered where he was. How he was doing. I thought about how he’s my friend on Facebook, and I wondered if he’d appreciate a message:
“Funniest thing, Vag! I know we haven’t spoken in 16 years, but I was lying in the Mulletville OB-GYN and the Go-Go doctor turned to me and said...”
Heh. Facebook.
After a grueling internal ultrasound (during which the doctor invited someone else in— I’d forgotten how pregnancy shreds you of any decency), she finally got the picture she was looking for. She told me, based on her preliminary findings, that she wasn’t going to red flag my child as being a four-headed, half-gecko, half-orangutan Frankenstein baby. She wouldn’t tell me everything looked good, just that she wasn’t going to red flag it.
At that point I was ready to whack her over the head with the vag wand. Then she said, “Do you want to know the sex?”
My heart skipped a beat. I started to sweat. My dentures clacked with excitement. “Yes!”
“It’s a...”
Oops, gotta run. Vag just emailed me back. He finally wants to sign my yearbook!
