Cold speculums are now a thing of the past, apparently. Which is good, I appreciate the extra concern for our delicate sensibilities.
A warning that the speculum is kept on a heating pad mighta been in order, however! :eek:
C’mon, share a not unpleasant surprise that caught you unprepared, help me feel like less of a dork for the vertical leap I performed at the doc’s today. :smack:
I’m laying on my back, wrapped in a paper sheet that’s got a big rip down the back, my feet up in stirrups, with some strange man looking at a place only Ivylad normally sees.
A cold or warm speculum is not going to make this a pleasurable experience, let me tell ya. 
But it’s nice to know I’ll have a warm piece of metal shoved up inside me instead of a cold one. Yes. That will make ALL the difference.
(I can’t think of anything personally right off hand. I’ll come back when I can.)
My Doctor ran it under warm water and then put it on my thigh to ask me if that was a good temperature. What a nice guy.
::walks quietly out of thread::
I think the last time it might have been a plastic one, or something – it certainly wasn’t either cold or warm. Still uncomfortable, of course. I haaaate when they crank it open a bit.
Whatever happend to TMI warnings?
My doctor’s third knuckle was quite unexpected.
Does anyone else’s doctor warm up the stirrups, too?
Ironic, eh?
My doc has finished every year for the past 5 with the statement “Good for another 10,000 miles”
I just don’t know what to say to that.
Thank you! 
I broke my coccyx. Suffice to say setting a broken coccyx involves lube and a rubber glove. My doctor had huge hands. As I was situated on all fours on the examining table, he mentioned something about how this might hurt a little.
Hurt a little is right. I think I broke his index finger.
Mine puts little oven mitts over hers. Very cozy.
My first mammogram was a nasty surprise. Somehow I thought it would just be like a sort of chest X-ray.
How about “Didja rotate the tires, I noticed that she’s pullin to the left a little when I get up to speed”
Did you know that speculums come in different sizes? I didn’t, until my gyno used the wrong one on me. I did the vertical leap, too. He later admitted it was something like two sizes up from the one he should have used.
Once I was laying there and the Doctor turned to his aide and said “hmmm, what happened to all of the smaller ones?” He was going to just ‘go ahead’ and use a bigger one until I spoke up and said, “No sir, how about you search every room in this hospital or I’ll kindly be on my way.”
He found it.
As usual w/ insensitive gynos, the operative word here is ‘he’. They haven’t a clue and wouldn’t if you handed it to them strapped to a donkey.
I have yet to find a male gyno who doesn’t seem to think of women as mindless breeding pieces of meat he has to condescend to once a year for the shortest amount of time he can. I hear there are great ones out there, but personal experience tells me otherwise.
I dunno. Maybe she was just jaded from seeing a long line of college girls with mysterious rashes and unwanted pregnancies, but the gyno I saw (for a routine check-up) at the student health center a while back was female and about the least sensitive person you can imagine. I’m fairly certain that she used a speculum that was a couple sizes too big, and she wasn’t any too careful about inserting it, either. I don’t know what part of “not yet engaging in penetrative intercourse” she didn’t get, but I was hobbling for the rest of the day.
My regular gynecologist is quite nice and caring, though. Too bad I’m probably going to have to go hunting for a new one now that I’ve decided my move is permanent.
I’ve gone to a doc who had little terrycloth covers on the stirrups. I found that this little item did make the experience a bit less uncomfortable.
My mother says that when she goes in for a mammo, she’s a 42D, but when she comes out, she’s a 52 Long. I didn’t understand this until I started getting mammos myself.
As for sensitive/insensitve gynos go, my experiences with males shows that they are on both ends of the spectrum…the most sensitive gyno I’ve had was male, as was the most insensitive. On average, I find that females tend to be a little bit more empathetic about these things, but I’ve had some insensitive females poking around in my pink and tender bits, too.
This has been a “few” years, but have you ever seen the assorted sizes that diaphrams come in? Geez Louise, some of them are as big as the openings to butterfly nets!