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 1st. As far as I’m concerned, July 29th is just as good a day to make resolutions as January 1st. 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 1st, at the stroke of midnight, to be exact. There could not possibly be a better way to kick off the new year, now 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 in the morning with all private clinics closed, I had no other choice but to go to the hospital. So, I went to the one closest to home. However, I wound up leaving as soon as I entered because the receptionist informed me I would have to pay double what an Egyptian would pay for treatment just because I was a foreigner. Really? 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 professionally 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’m talking about. Or so I thought. The nurse phoned the doctor and tried to explain my situation, but to no avail. The doctor herself 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, if only because most Egyptian gynos 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.
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 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 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 bas 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 toilet. To which he responded, “don’t be a spoiled American.” Indeed.
Heck, if I could make it through hole-in-the ground 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 seemed to think so. Does that count?
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.”
>*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 previous patient. 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—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.