Call me crazy, but it’s a little unfair that once a year I, as a young woman, have to put my legs into stirrups so a stranger can poke around in my vagina. Men don’t have to deal with that, am I right?
I’m a little sour about it, or at least I was before my first gynecology appointment. It is suggested that young women get their first pap test at the age of 21, and after that, you really only need one every three years.
I don’t think a pap smear sounds appealing to anyone, but it shouldn’t be something you dread either. That’s why I’m here, in hopes that in reading this, I ease at least one person’s mind about this whole thing.
At my first visit, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had never met my new doctor and I had little to no information about how the process works apart from my friend who told me, “My gynecologist is an old male doctor who literally answered his phone in the middle of our appointment…while he was inside of me with the speculum.”
Yeah…that’s the picture that was painted for me before my first appointment.
Don’t fret ladies, it’s really not that bad, and if you get a badass gynecologist like I did, you’ll walk away from the experience a new lady. That is my hope for you all.
So the process goes like this: question, question, question, minor breast exam (hopefully they tell you how to check yourself for lumps), stirrups, swab sample.
The whole process probably took less than 20 minutes. Pretty painless right? The most uncomfortable part was probably the swab sample. Uncomfortable, but not really painful. For this part, they graze the walls of your vagina for a sample to run tests on.
The process was very cool for me, and I think I got lucky in this respect because my gynecologist walked me through the whole process. She explained how to do self-breast examinations on myself and even explained and pointed out things that I felt like I should have known.
For instance, I couldn’t have told you where my cervix was before, but I can now because she showed me. Yes, my gyno handed me a mirror at the beginning of my exam and showed me every part of the process including pointing out all the female parts. If you aren’t too squeamish, I would suggest asking your gyno to do the same for you.
If anything, watching what she was doing just helped keep my mind off the discomfort of what was really going on. It also helped me realize that there’s a lot going on down there that I didn’t know about before.
The coolest part of my gyno visit was that she asked consent before she started. It was a whole conversation that happened before my pap. It’s a conversation no other doctor has had with me before examinations. At all of my doctor’s visits prior to, the doctor kind of just got down to business. Is this a new era thing? Either way, it’s pretty awesome.
Only 17 percent of women see their gyno for their annual visit. It’s not on my list of favorite things to do but those 20 minutes can answer all those questions you have or all of those questions you didn’t know you had.
