Warning: If you have an aversion to feminine products
or problems, or are generally squeamish, proceed no further.

I totally didn’t intend
my first blog post of the year to be about my period, but hey, it’s better than
some soppy post about New Year’s resolutions. Years come and years go, and I
never make resolutions. They are worthless, and nobody keeps them anyway. Besides,
there is nothing special about January 1^st. As far as I’m concerned,
July 29^th is just as good a day to make resolutions as January 1^st.
Because there is no such thing as time. Not here in Egypt anyway.

Back to my period.
If anything, my monthly cycle is the closest thing to time. It is always punctual
and always painful, and I can always count on it coming (that is more than I
can say for most people, including myself). And, conveniently enough, it came
back to haunt me on January 1^st, at the stroke of midnight, to be
exact. There could not possibly be a better way to kick off the new year, could
there?

The reason I’m
blogging about my period is because I wound up touring four hospitals because
of it. In one of my many moments of absent-mindedness, I inserted a tampon without
remembering if I had removed the previous one. So, what did I do about it? I
removed the new one and panicked about the possibility of the old one floating
around up there. Left unremoved, a floating tampon can cause Toxic Shock
Syndrome (TSS), which is potentially fatal. Plus, there was no way I could
have performed a tampon extraction with my absurdly long nails. 

At 1 a.m. with all
private clinics closed, I had no other choice but to go to the hospital. I went
to the one closest to home, but I left when I learned I would have to pay
double what an Egyptian would pay for treatment just because I was a foreigner.
Really?, I thought. I’m a tax-paying resident who pumps more money into this
economy than most Egyptians, and the hospital wants to play Khan al-Khalili
with me?

Determined to be
examined, I then walked into a reputable private hospital called Mustashfa Al-Salam Al-Dawli. Hospital of
International Peace. I entered the emergency room and requested to see a
gynecologist. There were two of them on staff, but first I would have to
explain my predicament to the nurse. I did just that, telling her I had an old
tampon floating around “up in there” and needed to have it removed. 

“You have a what?”
she asked.  “A tampon,” I answered. “You
know, Tampax?” The nurse had no idea what I was talking about, so I told her what
a tampon was. She still did not get it, so I pulled one out of my purse and opened
it, thinking that if she saw it, she would understand. 

Nope. 

“Okay, could you
please call the doctor in?” I asked. Surely a licensed gyno would know what I
was talking about. Or so I thought. The nurse phoned the doctor and tried to
explain my situation, but to no avail. The doctor had no idea what a tampon was!
I tried explaining again, only to have the nurse tell me there was nothing she
could do for me. “Ok nurse, what about the other doctor?” “He’s home right now,
but I’ll call him and have him come in.” She called him, we spoke, and I left.
He too hadn’t a clue what a tampon was, and did not think it was worth coming in
to find out.

Pissed and getting
more panicky by the minute, I then went to Qasr
El-Aini Hospital, which is
supposed to be a French hospital. Surely the French know a thing or two about
tampons. 

Nope. The only thing
French about the hospital was its history. I explained my situation to the
resident gyno there and pulled the opened tampon out of my purse to
demonstrate, only to be met by a confused look and an “I’m sorry, I don’t know
what that is so I can’t help you.”

Ugh! I don’t care
what culture you come from. How do you call yourself a gynecologist and not
know what a tampon is?! And what do I have to do to get someone to put their hand
up there and take something out? Go to a mechanic? Tell them there is a pot of
gold on the other side of the rainbow? Damn! You would think getting examined
would be much easier than this, especially considering that most gynos in Egypt
are men.

Not ready to raise
the white flag, I walked to another nearby public hospital. It was now 3 a.m.,
and I was tired, cold, cranky and ridden with anxiety. To make matters worse, I
heard a woman screaming bloody murder from the hospital I was approaching while
I was still quite a distance away. Yikes.
Is this a hospital or a torture chamber, I thought to myself.  

Reluctantly, I
walked into the hospital and asked to see the gynecologist. A youngish man in a
surgeon’s cap came to greet me and ask me what my problem was. “Doctor,” I said
in Arabic.  “Do you know what a tampon
is?” “Yes,” he said. “Are you sure? Shall I show you?” “No need,” he responded.
“What’s wrong?” I told the doctor that I had my beeriod, that I think I accidentally shoved a tampon up my system,
and that I would need to have it removed before it caused a potentially fatal
bacterial infection. 

And then, the
doctor said the magic words: “Tooxic Shook
Syndroom”.

 >D

“THANK YOU!” I
blurted in English. “You actually know what I’m talking about! I have just been
to three hospitals and no one knows what a tampon is, let alone TSS!” The
doctor laughed and said “heeya dee masr.”
This is Egypt. He then took my blood pressure and told me to sit tight until he
finished with his screaming patient.

I sat in a tiny reception
area for at least half an hour, anxiously awaiting to be seen. In the meantime,
his patient snuck out of the examining room and stood in front of me. She was
wailing, and she had blood stains all over her beige velvet galabiyya. I, for one, was having second
thoughts about letting that doctor put his hands on me. And I was about to walk
out…. 

…except I was
distracted by the site of this poor woman prying no less than twelve small earrings
out of her ears. Apparently, she was about to undergo some kind of CT scan, but
was having a difficult time getting all those 24 karat gold studs out. They
must have been fastened quite tightly, because with each twist and yank, she
produced more tears and screams.

At that point, the
entire medical staff had just about had it with her. A tiny male nurse missing
all his front teeth reached up to the woman’s ears with a longish pair of
medical tongs and forcefully twisted the backs off the earrings, one at a time.
What. Za Fuck? I could not believe
what I was watching. Had I not been put off by the pus oozing out of her
inflamed holes, I might have offered to help remove some of the earrings.
Instead, I got on my knees and scanned the floor for the fallen studs. 

My earring search
was interrupted by the doctor, who was now ready to examine me. He guided me
into a curtained area with two examining tables. He then handed me a bed sheet
to wrap around my bottom, and stepped out while I got undressed. But, I just
couldn’t get myself to take my pants off. For starters, the bed sheet was
soiled with every type of biological stain imaginable—red, yellow, brown,
green. The examining tables were bare, devoid of that noisy, crinkly paper that
doctors back home put on their tables for sanitary reasons. And there were
several blood-stained tissues lying on the floor. HellOOO? Why wasn’t there a Biohazard waste
basket there?!

(Speaking of
biohazard waste baskets, I remembered the time I accompanied a friend’s friend
to a Cairo hospital to have her thighs lipo-suctioned. (It’s really cheap in
Egypt.) When the doctor finished the procedure, he sent us home with a black
plastic bag containing her removed thigh fat! Imagine that! Lugging your own
body fat around in a plastic bag! He probably had nowhere else to dispose of it
because there are no biohazard baskets in Egypt. The bag was really heavy too.)

I remember
thinking to myself, if this is what Egyptian hospitals are like, what the heck are
their prisons like?

There I stood, paralyzed
with disgust and horror. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Leave? Complain?
Puke? I suddenly remembered some good advice given to me when I was in Syria
studying Arabic in 2007. I told the language program administer there that I wanted
to change my apartment because I was not getting along very well with the hole-in-the
ground baladi toilet. To which he responded, “don’t be a spoiled
American.” Indeed.

Heck, if I could
make it through baladi toilets with violent food poisoning, I could definitely
survive a simple gyno procedure in this hospital. Besides, I needed to get that
tampon out. My solution was thus to request a clean bed sheet and just get on
with it. Except that a nurse pulled an equally dirty sheet off of a neighboring
examining table and handed it to me. No, that’s NOT what I meant by clean!

I quickly realized
this was as good as it was going to get. I undressed my bottom half, loosely
wrapped that nasty cloth around me, and called the doctor in. Thankfully, I did
not have to tell him to put a latex glove on. The doctor then asked me a series
of questions, one of which was, “are you a virgin?” Well, the last gynecologist
who examined me in Egypt seemed to think so…

And then, the
doctor raised his hand in preparation, and told me, in his very Egyptian
English, “Na-ow I will going to ixblore
your vagina.”

Oh…My…G-d.  >*D

I almost died. I
burst into uncontrollable laughter in the poor man’s face! He “will going to ixblore my vagina!” The doctor turned
red… as red as the bloodstains on those sheets. I apologized, but I could not
contain my laughter. Once I composed myself, the doctor began ‘ixbloring.’ And I
began howling, just like the patient with pus-oozing ears. That was easily the
most painful ten seconds I had experienced in a while. And it was all for
nothing. It turned out that I didn’t have a tampon wedged up there after all. I
had just forgotten that I had taken it out before inserting a new one.

Because this was a
state-run hospital, I did not have to pay a penny for this false alarm (and for
this truly revolting experience)—not even as a foreigner. I was thankful for
that, and grateful that I had met an experienced gynecologist. I’m not sure I
would ever step foot into that place again, but who knows? Maybe the doctor
makes house calls.