This has nothing to do with the rest of this post. But it's so disturbing I had to share. (Image source: http://www.tmz.com)
Thankfully, she’s been out of the news so long I couldn’t remember her moniker. Hence I found myself googling, “woman who wants to be Angelina Jolie” and “woman with too many babies” before I stumbled upon it: OCTOMOM.
While I believe whole-heartedly in Zero Population Growth, I wasn’t googling that Waste of Space because I wanted to mount my soapbox. No, it was actually because I was trying to come up with a good comparison to make this statement come to life:
Today I used so much KY Jelly I think I may have outpaced Jenna Jameson and the Octomom combined.
Now I have your attention, don’t I?
I better clarify: my gel was smeared – not on my privates, but rather – on my legs.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m having some random thing happen where my left leg spontaneously decides to swell to the size of a loaf of bread. (And not a French baguette, which would actually look relatively shapely in a stiletto.) We are talking about a serious cankle.
Every doctor that has seen me is left scratching his head, calling me a medical mystery. So today, in an effort to make like Sherlock and solve this puzzle, I went to the radiology clinic in Northern Virginia and spent an hour getting comprehensive ultrasounds of my legs.
I’ve already had a few ultrasounds of my legs this past month, checking for blood clots. But today, in addition to doing that, the technician performed a rather involved series of tests. Let me give you an image to go with that:
Picture me, wearing a pair of disposable shorts designed for a 200 lb man, rolled up and tucked into the seams of my bikini underwear. Now picture me in that garb, standing on pedestal in ballerina pose on my toes so that my calf muscle is flexed – one leg at a time. Sadly, I looked more like the New Year’s Baby than Natalie Portman in Black Swan.
And as I stood there, the technician squirted hot KY Jelly all over my legs from the thigh to the ankle. COPIOUS amounts. I think she saw the horror in my eyes, because she said, “Don’t worry, I’ll give you some towels and wet wipes so you can get it all off before you get dressed.”
I thanked her, explaining, “Sorry. I was having flashbacks to my first OBGYN visit in college. I abandoned my bike at the doctor’s office because I was pretty sure I’d slip off it if I tried to ride it home.”
She laughed, but I felt like I had kind of creeped her out with an inappropriate joke (because I apparently know no boundaries with strangers), so I tried to recover. And because I still haven’t learned to ever leave well enough alone, my idea of recovering was to suggest that today I might slide out of my car on the drive home if she didn’t give me enough towels.
Um. Yeah. There’s a reason I don’t do stand-up.
When it was all done, I spent about ten minutes and four towels trying to get every last trace of gel off my legs. It reminded me of that fateful OBGYN visit, when I’d found that the tissues they provided were wholly inadequate and just wadded up the paper gown and used it instead.
I wish today I’d had a bit more self-restraint. I ended up using my disposable shorts to help sop up the gel, but as soon as I drove off, I found myself wishing I had salvaged them and tucked them in my bag for later use. I wasn’t sure exactly how they might come in handy, but I have to believe there’s a Halloween costume out there that involves a hospital blue Baby Huey diaper.
The good news is that next time I go in for an odd medical procedure, I won’t be at a loss for inappropriate conversation starters. I can already imagine it now.
“So. You’re pretty lucky. You can probably take these shorts home whenever you want.”
<Awkward silence.>
“Oh, no. I’m not implying you would. I’m just thinking how lucky you are that you can if you want. Because the last time I saw a pair, I got so much KY on them I had to throw them away, which completely ruled out the possibility of rolling them up and sticking them in my purse.”
This is why I should be escorted to the doctor and not allowed to speak.
pithypants 
Remind me to share my lower GI barium series study with you!
Sounds right up my alley! You might get a feature column! 🙂
Jokes at the doctor’s are never funny no matter what you do.
Case in point:
I had an infected kidney when I was 19. Huge amounts of pain, collapsed during a choir concert under stage lights in front of too many people to count. I had to go to get an ultrasound to double check all my organs.
I’m lying down, getting gooped up. I’ve never had an ultrasound before, and I associate them with babies. I’ve seen ultrasound pictures. The ones without arrows pointing to fetuses just confuse me.
The technician is asking me what’s wrong, and skating her little paddle over my stomach.
“It’s my kidney.” I tell her.
“Oh no!” She exclaims, smiling at me. She points to a blurb on the screen. “It’s a baby!”
I start to hyperventilate. Badly. Panic attack. My roommate has to get me a paper bag.
“No, no!” Technician exclaims. “I’m kidding! That’s just your kidney!”
I think that probably would’ve been my reaction too – right before beating her in the head with the ultrasound paddle.
Oh, she was a bad technician. I would have beaten her if it hadn’t been for the struggling to breath thing.
Paul used to collect lawyer jokes when he was a new lawyer, until he got depressed that there were so *many* of them and they were all so insulting.
I’ve never found that med techs have a sense of humor when it comes to their work. One day when I went for a mammogram, I figured out why: I had received an email that morning with ten items comparing mammograms to a piece of fish on a marble slab. I asked the tech if she had seen it. The woman – who had been previously friendly and smiling – immediately turned cold and told me she had gotten it more than 50 times either via email or patients who had printed it and brought it to her.
Maybe, unlike you, our minds aren’t creative enough to produce a wide variety of jokes about medical procedures. I know KY Jelly only sends my mind skidding quickly in one direction.