Sometimes It's Hard to be a Woman

I just realized it's 2018 and about 20 years ago, I worked in the OB/Gyn clinic at the University hospital here. At that time, my girls looked like they do in the photo above and Stinky had meningitis. So, because of all of that, I am going to repost a blog I wrote several years ago about what it was like to work in obstetrics and gynecology in the late 1990's:

You may not want to work here if you either hate or love babies. If you hate babies you will be forced to deal with them on a daily basis. Many women who come back for their six week post-partum appointment will bring their spawn and someone has to hold them while their mothers are back in the stir-ups again. That somebody would be you.

If you love babies, your heart will break several times during your shift. You will have to treat pregnant women who have already had their last five children taken away from them and they'll claim that this time will be different. You won't believe them. You may also have to draw blood from women who tell you right off the bat that you won't find a usable vein. "Believe me. If there was one I could get to, I would have already found it and used it up." Since these women have very few teeth in their heads, you may make the assumption that what they're slamming in their veins is crank. Then when you are actually lucky enough to find one, your patients will get all excited and pay very careful attention to it's location so they can rush right home and slam some more.

You may not want to work here if you are a heterosexual male or a homosexual female and you want to stay attracted to women. There are many things you will see, hear and most importantly, smell that could dim your sexual interest. Just as, I am sure, there are several other clinics in the hospital that would have a similar effect on heterosexual women and homosexual men.

You may not want to work here if you have problems dealing with difficult people. On Thursdays you will be assigned to work the menopause clinic in the morning and the PMS clinic in the afternoon. If you choose this position, you might want to start cultivating a healthy after-work alcohol drinking regimen on Thursdays as well.

You may not want to work here if you are afraid of old people. You will see all kinds of women in various forms of undress here. There are certain clinics such as the uro-gyn clinic that is mainly populated by women with incontinence issues and most are over forty. For our own amusement, we prefer to think of this as the Ida/Eunice/Madge clinic, as opposed to the colposcopy clinic (dealing with the treatment of abnormal cells on the cervix generally as the result of exposure to HPV) which is mainly attended by women in their early twenties and therefore called the Ashley/Brittany/Nicole clinic.

You may not want to work here if you have a hard time saying no. Many women think that the root of any or all of their problems is harboring a uterus. They will ask you in several different ways if you will please see to it that their uterus is removed. Doctors are reluctant to perform a hysterectomy for no reason, as the surgery could cause scar tissue and sudden menopausal symptoms that may be much worse than the original complaint. Your job will be to tell these women, no - even if they try to trick you by calling their womb a cooter bug, which has happened, let me assure you.

You may not want to work here if you you have a hard time telling people things they don't want to accept. Many times the horrible pain women are feeling and are sure are fibroids, ectopic pregnancies, or endometriosis, is really just gas. You must be delicate in the delivery of this diagnosis as these same women are going to have to go home and tell their husbands that the tumor they were sure was only going to give them six more months to live, can easily be treated with Metamucil.

Oh yeah, the pay sucks, you don't get breaks and rarely will you get the chance to sit down for five minutes to eat your lunch. Now, when can you start?