I have a question: while you’re getting a mammogram, if you scream at the top of your lungs for them to stop, do they?
I did that. Didn’t help.
I don’t know if I had enough breath to be able to produce a scream…but it is a good question.
And the Google ads say:
Some kinda sense of humour Google’s got. 
“No hate or jealousy of men?” Not trying to be argumentative, but isn’t that really the thrust of your last post? Parsing it, the impression I get is that you (as the self-appointed representative of your gender) are overly inconvienced in our mutual great journey – to exist – given your annual common-era Western judeo-christian male-inflicted medical checkup? I mean christ, can you imagine what it like to be a woman 100,000 years ago? A man 100,000 years ago? Either 5,000 years ago? Come on!
Arrested Development GoB Plug
How about a needle into your testicles, or a small camera shoved up the urethra of the penis? Ever have a lump in the testicles and have to go through an ultrasound? No? Then don’t play that game.
I do not ascribe to the notion that men are at fault for the fact that we, women, have a vagina that needs examined. There are many women gynos now, are they part of the conspiracy too?
Medical exams can really suck, we all face certain ones. My husband has faced some bad ones, so have I. Let us commisserate with our board peer here who had a bad experience at a mammogram and stop this gender war over who has it worse.
Annually? Hell…since October of last year I’ve had almost 30 of these. (I’m dealing with uterine cancer…but still!) Number 30 is in 2 weeks. So not looking forward to it. And you’d think I’d be used to it by now. It’s getting to the point that I feel like I have to put my legs up just to go to the grocery store.
Pap smears are uncomfortable, but the worst gyno work I ever had was a pelvic ultrasound. I don’t know why it bothered me so much.
I had my feet up in the stirrups, and the woman doing the ultrasound put a condom over the wand (“So you don’t have baby tranducers!” she joked) and then told me to insert it into my own vagina. She took over after that, strirring it around to get the images she needed. She was really good at distracting me, getting me to chat about the house I was buying and the like, but it was still a very uncomfortable experience.
I’ve always wondered why I had to be the one to insert it.
It sounds like a good idea. You get to control the depth and the angle and how fast you take it, which ought to make it a little less uncomfortable to get in, at least. Not much help by the time she starts wiggling it around, but you’ve had the chance to get a little bit used to it by then.
There’s no such thing as “free”, so I guess what Indygrrl’s friend is saying, and she is endorsing, is that men should pay for women’s tampons. I don’t know how it is over there, but ISTR that this side the pond women’s health issues get about ten times the money spent on them that men’s do. It may be less; it may be as little as eight times. ::shrug:: Whatever.
Ah, yes. The ever-popular “dildo cam”.
I just have my yearly exam. I have yet to have the finger up my butt part, and I’ve had said exams from three different people, so I don’t know if it’s just the preference of the examiner or what. Thankfully they won’t want me to get mammograms for awhile; hopefully they will have come up with something less painful by then!
Guys, you get a quick finger. Not fun, I’ll grant (I’m guessing) but it’s not like they put something in there and crank it open a bit and then stick other stuff in there. Not that it hurts, exactly, but it’s sure on my list of Not Fun things to do. My current gyn has the gentlest speculum technique I’ve run into, but even so…ugg.
Female anatomy is sure inconvienient. And I don’t buy into the “it’s all the male doctors’ idea” stuff either, if you want to check out somebody’s vagina you have to get up close and personal with it.
I like being a woman, but I could do without some of the medical aspects.
It burns for three seconds and that’s it. World’s tiniest violin.
Until Doc LeBlanc goes at me with a speculum or tries to squish any of my bits between two metal plates, I’d definitely say the women have it. DO try not to be too disappointed.
I personally think that opthamological exams are the worst, what with the bright lights and the little blue thing pressed against your eyeball and the various (incredibly painful, to me) eyedrops.
Then again, I’ve never had any of the feminine nether regions examined, and was forced to do the eye thing twice a year for eighteen years, so, I may be unqualified.
But those damn eyedrops always would screw up my vision for well over 24 hours, man.
Okay, I’m not going to belittle your pain, men - surely there’s enough suffering going around, and none of that prostate business sounds the least bit fun.
But I’ll tell you what’s hilarious, and so typical.
Woman starts a thread about her experience with mammograms.
Man jumps in - “oh yeah, well mine’s worse.”
Remember this, single ladies, b/c this is Exactly what they do. Or at least Mine does, and I’ve heard it’s rampant.
You get a headache - they’ve got a migraine.
You get a cold - they’ve got pneumonia.
Cough? Bronchitis!!
Umm, no, at least not in this thread as Indygrrl “started it” by blaming we men for something, no free tampons, whatever. See above. Then she unloaded on us about how terrible it is to be a woman. I don’t think any man posted saying we have it worse.
I’m having my first mammogram in about two weeks. This thread is scaring me!
askeptic, 03-30-2006, 05:29 PM
Meh, that seemed more a toss off than serious post.
Without getting into the “she said/he said” argument, I will say that my husband has had to undergo a lot of colon examinations in the past few years. At least when you have a gyno exam, they don’t have you flush out your insides first. Frankly, I’d rather undergo a weekly gyno exam than one colon exam. Which I realize isn’t exclusive to men vs. women, but in our family at least thus far the colon been strictly his problem. I hope to keep it that way.
I’ve had two pelvic ultrasounds, and didn’t find them uncomfortable at all. Maybe the tech I had was particularly gentle, but she never did anything that was in the least bit uncomfortable.
And don’t be scared, LavenderBlue – not all mammos hurt. And the ones that do only hurt for a couple of seconds. Frankly, in terms of the pain I’ve felt during my life, that one rates well down the list. The worst pain ever was when I had a metal appliance inserted into the bones in my foot after surgery, and my golden retriever banged into it. :eek: I’d rather have a mammo any day!
If you’ve had a regular mammogram and something unusual shows up, they bring you back in for a second go-round. And that’s when the extremely painful squishing occurs, let me tell you. The first one, the tech tightened it so much that I couldn’t help myself, I hollared and told her how much it hurt (and might I add that she looked at me like I was a big baby but I didn’t say anything more), so then I just sucked it in but honestly it was so painful that it brought tears to my eyes. Then, to top it all off, they still couldn’t find what they were looking for and sent me for an ultrasound of the breast! (It was just one breast that they were looking at, I guess that’s fortunate it wasn’t both.)
Then my question became - okay, if an ultrasound will help you diagnose, why do the mammogram in the first place!!! Nothing was ever found, and I have no family history of breast cancer, btw. Although I was supposed to come back in six months, and then get a mammogram every year. Uh… that was about 2 years ago.