Funny Story—Gold: Ms. Intolerance and the Middle Aged Virgin
by Dodie Cross
As I set these thoughts to paper, I must tell the reader that I am fine now. In fact, as I write this I realize how lucky I am. However, that was not the case fifteen years ago.
I didn’t make it to the ladies room in time. I’d been playing golf with some friends and had just unloaded on a monstrous drive—well, monstrous for me—when my pipes sprung a leak. I needed to find a restroom. Fast! My friends watched with astonishment as I dropped my driver and commandeered the golf cart, yelling over my shoulder that I’d meet them at the next tee-box.
Sitting on the commode, I could remember my stateside doctor’s warning from at least six months earlier: “You’re going to need a bladder repair, and I wouldn’t wait too long if I were you. Your cystitis attacks are coming too often, which is one of the symptoms.”
But, just when I planned to make arrangements for the surgery, my boyfriend (soon to be my husband) was offered a job in Pattaya, Thailand. Now, I ask you, what’s more important, bladder surgery or a wonderful free trip to Thailand?
Also, important things had to be tended to before the we were to take this trip: shopping, packing, taking care of mail and bank accounts, shopping, packing, renting out the house, shopping packing, well, you get the picture. I just didn’t have time to mess around with something so unexciting as bladder surgery.
We’d been in Pattaya about three months when things started to go wrong. I’d had a few warning signs since being here: pain during intercourse, along with some embarrassing signs—damp knickers—and had to admit that I’d better see a doctor about getting my bladder hiked up a tad.
I was apprehensive about having bladder surgery, or any kind of surgery, in Thailand, but after interviewing a highly respected Thai OB/GYN, I felt relatively safe with the idea. She spoke passable English—that is I could understand her. She’d received her medical training in England, which cinched the deal for me. During the visit she assured me that the surgery would take no more than two hours. “I do bladah lepah many time. Doan worry.” She ended the visit with exactly what I wanted to hear: “In sree day you casseta come out, you pee-pee, then go home.”
It sounded relatively simple. How could anything go wrong? Sree day at most and my catheter would be removed. I would be discharged and my bladder and spirits would both be uplifted. I was to find out just how wrong her prediction was as the days passed.
With the admission paperwork completed I was shown to my room. I plunked down on the familiar concrete mattress and surveyed the meager surroundings. My hospital room was clean but sparse. I had a lovely view of the jungles and a few dumps from my small window. A peculiar odor permeated the place, somewhere between mildewed mops and Thai chili. The room, billed as “Private,” was more like a broom closet in drag. Picture the offspring of an outhouse and a phone booth. It barely had enough room for one cot-sized bed and a very small chair for a very small person.
The water closet, (Western, thankfully), was beyond being too small and looked like it might pose a problem for me. It was roughly the size of a Pullman-car bathroom. After a few tries I got the procedure down pat. I would back into the little cubicle, align my butt to just the right position and flop onto the toilet. The sink was conveniently close by and I found I could wash and dry my hands and/or brush my teeth while still sitting on the commode.
The next insult greeted me soon after admission. Here, in this land of tolerance and acceptance, where everyone treated you as an honored guest, in this very hospital of all places, I encountered probably the only Thai who was not tolerant, and who most assuredly lacked the mai pen rai outlook on life. She was a “Uniwersity graduate,” she haughtily informed me, and would be my nurse pre-and post-operatively.
The morning of my surgery, in walked my little Uniwersity graduate wheeling the prep cart. I smiled and said my usual Sawatdee kha greeting and tried my best to look like a proper patient. She obviously was on her own timetable and had no intention to be waylaid by farang chatter. I grew a bit apprehensive as she silently pushed her cart next to my bed with a business-as-usual look. My heart quickened as she removed a razor from a plastic bag—unsealed—and walked toward me as if I were a cadaver she was about to dissect. In her other hand she held a bottle of yellow liquid that I prayed was antibacterial soap. In one fell swoop she threw back my sheet and began to drizzle the yellow stuff between my legs.
“Please! No shave,” I whined, looking fearfully at the used razor now lying on my bed. She continued to drizzle.
“How about just a Betadine scrub and a poodle cut?”
She continued to drizzle. Then grabbed for the razor.
“No lather? Aw, c’mon. Surely you…”
She wasn’t listening. She began to rake the used razor across my pubic area from top to bottom—and from bottom to top—while I yelped, “Stop, stop, damn it, you’re hurting me!”
She spoke little English—and heard none.
Okay then how about “Yoot, yoot, damnit, jep, jep,” I squealed as I tried to pull out of her vice-like grip.
She continued to ignore me, trying for a better hold by wedging her tiny body between my legs, spreading them apart as if I were a turkey she was about to stuff. She continued to rake the antiquated backhoe into all my tender little crevices and folds.
“Oww! Cha cha!—slowly,” I yelped, tears streaking my freshly applied Clinique foundation and mascara.
She tsk-tsked me—the height of admonition from a Thai. I scanned the room for a means of escape. My eyes stopped on a familiar-looking water bag hanging from her cart. All of a sudden it hit me. “Oh no! You’re not giving me an enema!”
Without even a blink from her beautiful almond-shaped eyes, she dropped the razor and grabbed the insertion tube, and with malice aforethought rolled me onto my side and with one well-placed aim, plugged me in.
“Ahhiiiii!”
As sometimes happens to middle aged women, certain muscles are unwilling to cooperate—like sphincters. Sphincters that sometimes lose their will to thrive.
“Oh-oh,” I whimpered, grimacing as water from the enema bag back-flowed onto the bed, pooling up on the nice clean white sheets she had so meticulously placed that very morning.
That did it. I had her attention now. Her curved eyes narrowed into straight, tight lines. Her tiny rosebud lips went flat. She was pissed.
Did she think I did it on purpose?
“No, no, Madame!” she admonished me in perfect English, “you mut hold watah. No caca! No caca!”
Well, excuse me, Ms. Land of Smiling Faces! There will be no enema for this kid. I tore loose from her Terminator grip, jumped out of bed with water streaming down my legs and ran limping for the bathroom with her in hot pursuit—brandishing the enema tube. I did my rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s Slip-Sliding Away into the bathroom and slammed the door against her tiny size three nursey shoe.
As you might have already guessed, I did not endear myself to Ms. V.R. Siamese-If-You-Preeze and from that point on she was after me with a vengeance.
I was feeling no pain, thanks to the anesthetic, and sooo happy with the world as they wheeled me to my room from Recovery.
Then she walked in.
As my drug-induced fog began to clear I saw a slightly fragmented, thin-lipped mouth. I know I saw a little balloon above her head that read: “You’re all mine now, Round Eyes.”
I must be dreaming. Not her again!
She stood staring down at me while another balloon popped up that read: “I bet you thought you were rid of me. You lived through surgery, but now…”
Post surgery Ms. Intolerance evened the score as she methodically ripped off the tape from my surgical site—way up there—and smiled gleefully as she gave the blood pressure cuff a few extra pumps until I had Marty Feldman eyes.
When I was coherent enough to count five fingers in front of my face, I called for my doctor. She informed me that other patients had complained about Ms. Intolerance, and she would not be tending to me anymore.
With a large smile on my face, I was gurneyed to another floor the next morning, happily waving goodbye to Ms. Intolerance. I hoped that she would be demoted to the surgical stock room; counting enema bags and used razors until she retired.
Four days had passed since my surgery and my doctor felt it was time to pull the plug. She wanted to make sure I could urinate without the help of the catheter before I could be discharged.
Oh happy day! I was ecstatic. After she removed the catheter, she told me to drink three large glasses of water over a one-hour period. I was happy to comply.
“You drink sree glasses of watah, you pee sree glasses, then go home.”
It didn’t happen.
By hour two I was yelling like a circus barker, begging anyone within earshot to put the catheter back in; Ms. Intolerance, the European, the janitor, anyone.
The nurses tsk-tsked me and called the doctor into my room. “Wot wrong? You doan wan go home?” she asked with a hint of resignation in her voice.
“Of course I wan go home, but I can’t pee. It hurts like hell and nothing happens.”
She stared at me for a few moments. I was sure she was trying to understand why these farangs were so dense. “If you wan go home, you must pee-pee.”
“Please, doctor, it’s just not going to happen and I’m dying here from the pain. Please put the catheter back in and I’ll try again later…soon…tomorrow.”
A few minutes of cajoling and chiding me for “holding back watah,” she decided to reinsert the catheter, which took another twenty minutes with me crying in pain while interested nurses and visitors watched from the hall.
At this point I’d decided I would probably go through life with this damn catheter dangling between my legs. No more of this kind of pain. I wanted out of here.
Help me someone, I’m being held captive by a Thai catheter.
It was the same story the next day. No luck. I knew the dangers of infection with reinserting catheters, and I felt that my urethra was getting weary of this in-and-out crap. I made two managerial decisions. I was going home the next day, with or without this thing. If I hadn’t peed by noon, I was leaving the hospital AMA—Against Medical Advice—and would fly stateside to see a urologist as soon as I could get a flight back.
By 2:00 p.m. the next day, after giving it one more shot with the water—and no release—another catheter was inserted and I packed my bags.
With the catheter tubing wound once around my thigh, then tucked into my waistband, and the bag taped to my inner thigh, I jauntily exited the hospital AMA.
Over the next three days I worked diligently at getting rid of my little plastic friend. I could not face the exhausting trip stateside to see a specialist. I would drink three glasses of water, wait two hours, then drive to the emergency room to get un-cathed and fill three glasses for them. It didn’t happen, and I knew that the sneaky little bacteria were galloping in on every catheter change.
To make matters worse, I had the distinct feeling that the last insertion was incorrect, that the tip was not anchored correctly. It felt as though I were sitting on a #9 knitting needle, half in and half out. When I complained to the ER doc he told me not to worry about that strange feeling between my legs: “You’ll get used to it in time,” he said. Right! Easy for him to say. He’d been living with something between his legs all his life.
I have to admit, I was curious about this. Do men really feel all that stuff down there. I asked my husband.
“What?”
“When you sit down do you feel stuff between your legs”
“What?”
“I mean, you know, like your boys, do you feel them?”
“Christ!”
“What? I was just curious.
“I don’t know. Hell, I guess. Why?
“Never mind, you answered my question.
On December 28th, I left for the States to see a urologist and end this misery. I had to find out what was going on up there. Why couldn’t I pee and get this interloper out once and for all?
The doctor walked into the examining room, lifted the sheet draped over my spread-eagled lower half and with speculum in hand whispered, “Geez, Louise!”
I froze. “What does that mean?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t look away either. “Barbara,” he said to his nurse who was busy squeezing gooey clear stuff onto a gauze pad. “Get over here and look at this.” Barbara dutifully walked over for a peek. “Geez, Louise!”
They stared between my legs much too long. I wanted to slap my knees together and put an end to the shocked look on their faces. I felt my body, along with the room, becoming tropical. The table had become a stage for my disfigured female parts, with the audience entranced. Staring down at me from the ceiling was a picture of a clown; he also looked shocked. The doctor’s little hint at humor, I assumed, trying to loosen up his spread-eagled patients.
The doctor sucked in air between his teeth, “Ah, are you married?”
Flat on my back with legs in the air, it’s a bit difficult to act indignant. “Yes, I’m married. Why would you ask?”
“This is just my opinion, mind you, but I’m pretty sure your husband will have a problem here with intercourse.”
“Huh?”
“The doctor who did your bladder repair has you sewn up to the size of a ten-year-old old virgin.”
“Huh?”
“Who in the hell stitched you up like this?”
Five days, five catheter changes and five substantial doctor bills later, I was able to urinate on my own. The diagnosis was pretty simple: The Thai doctor had done the proper bladder repair, but maybe just a skosh too proper. The reason I wasn’t able to urinate without the catheter was that she’d stitched the bladder too high and it wasn’t able to release urine. Now that the bladder had had time to relax, things would work just spiffy. With the final removal of the catheter, the doctor said my life would return to normal—whatever that was.
The gynecologist I saw next for the “ten-year-old-virgin” problem was Asian. He felt he knew the culture well enough to say that it was not uncommon for Asian surgeons to give their female patients a little tuck after some GYN procedure. It was no different than a woman in the States who undergoes a minor abdominal surgery and the doctor sucks out a little unsightly blubber from her tummy while he’s got her laid open. He added that the Thai doc did what she most likely does for all her postpartum patients—restores their virginity. I guess this was the Thai wife’s answer to her husband’s wandering after she’s had a baby. And, to whom does he wander? Wirgins! That said, he did agree with my urologist that the Thai doctor was a bit overzealous with her stitching.
Final prognosis: I would need an episiotomy before having intercourse. Did I plan to have that done before I returned to Thailand, the good doctor asked? I don’t think so. It was not something I was ready to think about.
Before I even considered the episiotomy, he said, the infection caused by the multiple catheter changes would have to be cleared up. This would entail about ten days on antibiotics. He made a guesstimate that it would be at least two months before I should attempt intercourse.
Can anyone direct me to a good divorce attorney?
