Taking the p^ss

I recently had the minor misfortune to suffer a ‘downstairs’ ladies’ medical issue. Nothing of great import, just one of those things that women of a certain age become grudgingly accustomed to as the years slip away into oblivion. How I miss the halcyon days of the pert bosom, the kneecaps that don’t make an audible crunching sound as you heave yourself out of the Chesterfield, and the years when the dark hairs outweighed the grey – on both my head and my chin. Ah the blissful, slap-worthy ignorance of youth.

Nevertheless, this was the kind of downstairs issue I thought would benefit from a toe-curlingly awkward lockdown phone call to an exasperated GP, who wished she’d followed her girlhood dream of joining the Olympic dressage team, rather than her mother’s career advice of getting a proper job looking at people’s knackers all day long.

As the phone rang, I wondered if I should use the correct medical terminology or whether colloquialisms would suffice. Can you say ‘fanny’ to a general practitioner? Not sure. I wonder if it’s covered in Debrett’s. How about ‘vag’? That’s literally the front half of the correct clinical term, so you’re not straying too far from the text, but it’s much more user-friendly. Probably not. What about ‘foof’? Too fluffy. Or ‘tuppence’? Too Edwardian. I ruled out ‘clunge’ fairly early on and I was pretty sure ‘hairy axe wound’ would be frowned upon. I’d have to wing it.

As the doctor answered the phone, I immediately panicked and went full-on Concise Oxford Medical Dictionary. After some brief ham-fisted explanation on my part (and parts), the doctor explained that under normal circumstances she’d be happy to examine my nethers in person, but that, unsurprisingly, lockdown wouldn’t allow. I’d recently sent her a photo I’d taken on my phone of a skin issue I’d had on my face, so suggested I could do the same here. I’m not sure that warranted the ear-splitting screech of ‘NO!!! Please God, don’t do that!!’, but suffice to say, we decided against it.

As a result, she suggested instead that I take in a urine sample. That seemed simple enough. How difficult could it be? When I enquired as to exactly what I should collect said urine in, she replied in a very laissez-faire manner that ‘anything would do’. Helpfully vague. So after an exhaustive search of the dark recesses of my kitchen under-cupboards, it became apparent that the only vessel I could lay my hands on was an empty jar of oregano. I deduced that the circumference of the opening was large enough for adequate over-the-pan aiming, while the jar itself was small enough to be surreptitiously slipped into a pocket without causing suspicion while walking to the surgery to hand it in.

I suddenly remembered when I’d lived in Ealing some years before and, for reasons long since forgotten, I’d had to do a 24-hour urine test. I can tell you from experience that it’s not until you actually collect your own urine over a 24-hour period that you realise that that’s a hell of a lot of piss. In fact, it’s very nearly the entire two litre bottleful that the doctor had given me to put it in, inside a suitably opaque and blush-sparing hospital carrier bag. In those days my doctor was a bus ride away. I’ll never forget getting the Number 65 to Ealing Broadway, with a carrier bag full of piss that sloshed about every time the driver hurled round a corner or slammed on his brakes to avoid an errant cyclist. Or the small trail of drips that followed me down the stairs of the bus as I alighted at my destination. Happy days.

Having successfully filled the oregano jar (if ‘successfully’ means hovering over the toilet bowl til your otherwise unused-all-year thigh muscles lock solid, missing the jar and weeing on your own hand so that piss drips up your arm and soaks into your sleeve, dripping wee onto your new shoes that you only got from George at Asda yesterday, tripping over a toilet roll because your new George at Asda shoes feel like flippers and you can’t walk in them yet, accidentally dropping the jar and miraculously managing to catch it in mid-air before it lands butter-side down on the carpet, and getting piss in your eye because you absentmindedly rubbed it with your wee-drenched hand and it now stings), it was time for the drop-off.

Jar carefully hidden from public scrutiny in my coat pocket, I headed for the doctor’s surgery. Lockdown being the ointment-covered fly that it is, the doors to the building were locked tight for the duration and the only point of access to medical care was through an unopened window on the outside wall of the receptionist’s vestibule. Like a secret gateway to a hallowed inner sanctum.

I pressed a nearby buzzer. A blue gloved hand turned a handle from the inside and opened the window about two inches. The vague apparition of a masked face could be seen in the darkness. It became clear that I would have to surreptitiously pass my wee jar to an operative through a barely open window. Like a drug mule making a drop. A piss mule, if you will.

‘Hello. I’ve got a urine sample.’

The operative saw my oregano jar and, over her mask, gave me the look of someone who was already having a bad day and could see that it was just about to get worse.

‘It’s supposed to be in a proper sample bottle,’ she said. ‘With a red label.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Lockdown.’

‘But it’s a herb jar.’

‘I know. Oregano. The doctor told me ‘anything would do’. It was that or a sandwich bag.’

My masked marauder tutted, muttered something under her breath that I’m pretty sure contravened the Hippocratic oath, and looked at me as if I was an idiot. A blue rubbery hand appeared round the window and, like a berated child, I passed over the goods. Joke’s on her. It’s not watertight.

This is, of course, not the first time I’ve lost my dignity with a member of the medical profession. As anyone who’s ever given birth will know, when you whelp a child you’re required to leave your dignity, as well as your sanity and any last desperate hope of a good night’s sleep, very much at the door as, as my mother can often be heard saying, ‘There’s always someone looking up your flue.’ Wise words indeed.

One such someone was the fabled nurse who once did my smear test. As I lay on the bed, dignity in the car park, knees at quarter to three, she took one look at my cervix and said, ‘I see you’re a non-smoker’. If I could blow smoke out of there love, I’d be in the circus. As bizarre a clinical observation as that was, it wasn’t quite as disconcerting as the awkward smile and the unexpected thumbs-up she gave me as I left the room afterwards. A tableau vivant of Aneurin Bevin’s vision.

Not long ago, I had a 111 call-back, surprisingly from a paramedic, who thankfully had nothing better to do than to chat to me for 20 minutes about my haemorrhoids. As grateful as I was for the interest, his call was somewhat untimely, as when the phone rang, I was sitting round a table in an outdoor café having lunch with some arty types I barely knew. When he told me his name was Russell and he was phoning about my grapes, it became clear I needed to make a hasty yet inconspicuous retreat.

I stalled him momentarily by discussing the inclement weather, then excused myself from my fellow diners and delicately lifted my posterior off the cushion I’d pre-emptively placed on the hard wicker chair. I tentatively hobbled away from the table, with the staggered gait of a Cornish trawlerman and what felt like a rear gusset full of Jersey Royals, to find somewhere out of dining earshot. I squeezed into an unoccupied nook next to an aspidistra and in a stage whisper worthy of the finest am-dram performance of Charlie’s Aunt, managed to communicate to Russell that I was in some discomfort in the trouser area. He assured me that his wife gets them too (too much chocolate apparently) and that they would go down with a bit of deftly applied cream. Which they eventually did.

I was grateful to the relief brought by Russell and his back-door expertise, but to this day I’m still not sure if anyone in the café overheard my conversation or if I’d unintentionally put them off their roasted grape and brie flatbread. I do know, however, that every time I’ve been there since, the waiter has always directed me to the table in the soft seating area.

For reasons that don’t bear going into, I also suffer the interminable inconvenience of the annual mammogram, or as I call it, the ‘boob sandwich’. Every year, bra off, baps out, rough manhandling of chesticles by a burly Russian operative as she pulls them hither and yon, stretching them to their optimum photogenic capacity between the two plates of glass that, at a touch of a button, will squeeze them to within an inch of their lives, as Yelena goes behind a screen and tells me to hold my breath while she takes the picture. One of these days I genuinely expect to stand there, tits ensnared, breath held, eyes watering, head strained awkwardly backwards as if mid-Viennese waltz and hear the words ‘Say cheese!’ in a deep Russian lilt.

The mammogram does, however, pale into insignificance compared with the breast MRI, which is what the kids are calling ‘whole other level’ humiliation, as I found out the day I went for my first foray into magnetic imaging. The sequence of shameful events started in a broom-cupboard-sized changing room where I had to disrobe, removing everything but my knickers. If only I’d foreseen this eventuality, I would have worn my ‘special occasions’, rather than the saggy old apple-catchers I was currently sporting. I concealed my shame with the obligatory blue and white hospital gown, tied at the front for ease of access, making a point of taking one from the plastic bag on the left rather than the plastic bag on the right, which was marked ‘Soiled’. Exactly how soiled can you get during an MRI..?

In just gown, pants and trainers, like a half-dressed toddler playing dress-up in Mummy’s nightie, I walked into the MRI suite, to be greeted by the foreboding sight of the enormous, hollowed-out MRI machine, looking like some great tubular Transformer. At this point, I also noticed the stepladder. It became clear that in order to get on to the sliding table that would propel me into Optimus Prime’s gaping mouth, I would first have to hoick myself up a flight of rickety steps. I girded my loins, alighted the rungs like a decorator ascending to touch up the mouldings, and climbed onto the table, where I had to turn around, get on all fours and position myself over a contraption with two conspicuously placed holes in it.

Trying to maintain my balance, and any fading remanence of dignity, I unfettered my boobs by opening the hospital gown at the front. Then, arse up, I lowered myself slowly down, carefully aligning each pendulous appendage with its corresponding tit hole, which, despite the fact that breasts are generally speaking very much breast shaped, were rectangular, had sharp edges and were undoubtedly designed by a man.

Face down, with my head in a vice and the granite-hard sides of each tit hole digging into my ribs, I lay with my arms above my head and ill-fitting 1970s-style headphones on my ears, sweating like a navvy and singing show tunes to drown out the deafening noise of the machine’s whirring magnets for the longest 40 minutes of my life. I came out, ears ringing, arms numb and tits battered, then went home, made a cup of tea and questioned everything about my life.

Ah, boobs. As my Auntie Doris once said to me, ‘They don’t get any smaller, they just hang lower.’

There’s very little dignity involved in life, certainly not if you’re a woman. As for my downstairs urinary issue? Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that after a short course of antibiotics, my money-maker is once again in perfect working order. I must say though that my grapes are starting to play up again. Now where did I leave my phone camera?