You Wanna Put That Where?
Hudson Health Center is packed; swirling with sickness like a Sub-Saharan hospital. I tuck my nose in my shirt to shield myself from the coughing, sniffling, sneezing carriers of the common college cold, which spreads across campus like mono in the San Fernando Valley.
Reason for today’s visit: STD test.
Now—before you stone me to death on College Green, or close for business when you see me out on the town—prior to this visit, I have had no symptoms of a sexually transmitted infection. But, about a month ago, I awoke with my hands covered in stamps, and the leg of an unfamiliar female draped over my torso.
“Are we in my bed or yours?” I asked, wiggling away from the uncomfortable prickly pad against my hip.
After she left, I scavenged my room for a used contraceptive: a condom, a diaphragm, a balloon—anything. An STD is the scarlet letter of the 21st Century, and I was going to be the new Hester Prynne.
Any half-credible online source says it’s pointless to get “the test” within a month of your last unprotected sexual encounter. The incubation period for infections like chlamydia and gonorrhea is one to two weeks, but symptoms may not appear for a month. So I wait the length of February — because no one said which month was the industry standard — and I’m on my way to Hudson. Call me neurotic. Maybe I am. The fact that sex has become a game of Russian roulette makes my bowels churn like tires in mud.
A nurse, dressed like an elementary school teacher, summons me to her quarters and begins taking my blood pressure. Pumping the sphygmomanometer, she whispers, “You really want the swab test?”
Back in the waiting room, a few minutes later, another nurse waddles in and mispronounces my family’s name as if it were spelled the same as a racial slur. She drags my hopeless corpse through the health center’s corridors and into a physician’s office. The doctor is short and bald with a pearl-white goatee, and he’s standing in silhouette between half-open curtains and it’s very Stalin-esque.
“So?” he says.
“I want to, um, get tested,” I say.
He grins and leads me into the adjacent examination room, which is lit like a morgue and furnished with a blood-red gurney. I sit, cursing God. The doctor drapes a white cloth over my waist and shuffles toward his tools. With his back to me he says, “Your size will determine which cotton-tipped swab we use.”
My scrotum tightens instantly, hardening to the texture of an armadillo, and I begin to sweat.
“For the big boys,” he says and turns toward me, holding up the biggest Q-Tip I have ever seen. It’s what you’d use to clean an elephant’s ears; it’s a barbell for quadriplegics. It’s going to cause irreparable damage unto my phallus.
“There is no way that’s going to fit,” I say, panicking.
He grins again, revealing in his other hand something that looks like two toothpicks welded end-to-end. Patting the hips of the gurney, he says, “I want you to hold on to the sides here, OK?”
I clench the padding tight, as if he’s about to deliver a baby rhino from my anus, and his hands disappear under the white cloth. The last thing I hear is a quick wisp.
The rest of my body goes numb. The pain is centered and pulsating in the tiny canal of my penis. The doctor scrapes the Q-Tip inside my sphincter urethrae the way a fat kid spoons a bowl of ice cream, and I keep thinking I am never having sex again. From the undressed window a pair of skaters are wide-eyed and slackjawed, watching the doctor conduct some sort of masturbatory exorcism.
“This is horrible!” I yelp, stretched out, toes curled, Lamaze breathing.
The entire procedure lasts only a couple seconds. He removes the swab, which makes a “thoonk” sound as it exits, and it’s all over.
“Relax,” he says. “Your blood pressure’s so high you might start squirting.”
Squirting what, exactly? Urine? Blood? Brain matter?
“I don’t know if I can thank you for this,” I say, pulling up my pants, feeling cold and uncomfortable, like a hermaphrodite at a public pool. He laughs and marks another notch on his penis probe.
There’s a twenty-four hour waiting period for the results. My guess is they want you to use that day to evaluate the recklessness of your sexual behavior, to sleep (or not) on the feeling of foreign objects in your pee hole.
The next day I call Hudson’s STD Hotline. A moody receptionist answers.
“Your test results came back negative,” she says.
“Like, negative, as in not good?”
“No,” she says coldly. “Like, negative, as in you have neither Chlamydia nor gonorrhea — this time.”
Yes, I am clean and clear, and besides writhing pain the next time I urinate, there’s something to be gained from this experience. I’d rather spend a night handcuffed, on Viagra, with Lorena Bobbit in a room full of scissors than go through this again. But I won’t go celibate, either. The real risk is in our choices, which no Fear-God-Because-Sex-is-a-Sin commercial can make for us. It’s our responsibility to be safe. Indeed, the current method of testing for sexually transmitted infections is a primitive, Pavlovian way to teach a lesson, but it’s effective nonetheless.
Direct link: http://backdropmag.com/sex-and-health/you-wanna-put-that-where/