Raw Drip

Any woman will tell you that the annual trip to her gynecologist doesn’t rank very high on her scale of fun ways to spend an afternoon. I don’t care how great, gentle, kind or cute your doctor is, it’s just not fun being subjected to a clinical investigation of one’s nether regions.

So when the highlight of my most recent visit involved Dr. G saying, “Well THAT looks interesting…”, in my mind, something had gone shockingly wrong.

My husband checking out the goodies should elicit such an enthusiastic expression of interest. But to think, after all the genitalia my OB/GYN had undoubtedly seen, that I’d have something so remarkable going on down there that it would merit comment – even the word “interesting” no less. Well, that just made me nervous.

Using my elbows to prop myself up, to my relief, I could see that the comment had been uttered not as he was examining me, but as he was hunched over my file reviewing my ultrasound results from early May.

“Yes, this is very, interesting. It looks like the exam you had in New Jersey in February stated that your left ovary is missing, but it’s definitely present on the ultrasound we did here a few weeks ago.”

What? How could this be? This was shocking to me. It was even more astonishing than the brief prospect that my genitalia was somehow so hideous as to merit comment. How could my ovary go missing and then just return? Aren’t organs, more reliable than that? Couldn’t that be a sign of disease or something, that my organs leave and come back? Surely that kind of unreliability in an organ should be cause for alarm, right?

When I pointed out my concerns, Dr. G looked at me with an odd expression and said, “Actually, your organ probably never went anywhere, it was just obscured. But we do find, from time to time, particularly with ovaries, that the organ may atrophy and be absorbed by the body. That just wasn’t the case for you.”

“Okay, so my left ovary never went anywhere and now you’re telling me it’s been there all along. Presumably there was some sort of a trained professional looking over my ultrasound from February, no?”

“You had this done in up in New Jersey so I can’t attest to the training of the person reviewing your results, but I can tell you that you had quite a serious infection at the time and it’s likely the presence of the infection somehow contributed to that finding. I haven’t gotten the film from them yet – but, have you ever seen an ultrasound? Even in the best of circumstances it can be hard to make things out easily.”

I had to admire his candor. My only exerpience with ultrasound technology had been when Dick and I were expecting Adam. In the darkened radiology exam room, our ultrasound technician would point out all the various baby bits during our monthly exam as Dick and I spent all our time squinting at the screen, trying to look like we saw something, too.

Later, showing photos of our baby to friends and family we would describe our interpretation of Adam as looking somewhat like a storm front over Northern Illinois. With all the vague white & gray blobs standing in for organs and body parts, we were hard pressed to find anyone with a sufficiently creative eye to challenge our interpretation. More often than not, people would either make a brief, fruitless effort to decipher our little storm front’s gender by aligning comma shaped blobs with other blobs in the photos, or they’d wave their hands in surrender saying, “I can never make out those darn things…”.

And now I was being assured by a physician that no one can. Not even the highly trained, so-called, professionals can tell what they’re looking at.

And so it goes. I’d like to say I feel happy or comforted by the knowledge of Lefty’s continued presence in my left pelvic area, but instead I feel like a long-sufferring soap opera character who keeps losing the same love interest over and over again to increasingly ridiculous plot twists only to have him resurface in the form of another actor or another character months or even years later. Lefty’s return might have been similarly dramatic were it not for the ridiculous plot twist fate had written for our story.

But come on. You have to admit, as gynecological blog entries go, my case of ovarian peek-a-boo is certainly more interesting than most. Between you, me (and lefty, too, I suppose) I hope future observations of my internal anatomy result in less of a freak show taint and safely reside in the realm of the routine.