A few weeks ago I made my first – and last – visit to Planned Parenthood. I thought, “Hey, if I’m going to keep defending the funding of this place against those congressional dillholes, maybe I should check it out.”
No, nope. That’s a complete lie. I had a raging UTI and, being that I’m uninsured, my options were Planned Parenthood, black market antibiotics, or letting the infection travel up to my kidneys until it ravaged them to my very death. In retrospect, I should have chosen option B or C (by which I mean B, of course).
If you haven’t read Bossypants, Tina Fey includes a relatively funny vignette entitled “Suburban Girl Seeks Urban Health Care.” B. was actually reading it while we were sitting in the waiting room, but he didn’t tell me until afterwards because by then I was ready to flee. Oh my god, the waiting room. I wanted to say that the waiting room is literally where happiness goes to die, but I hate when people misuse “literally,” so I’ll instead say that the waiting room is figuratively where happiness goes to die. It was a tiny room of miserable women and their equally pathetic partners or, even worse, their feral offspring. There were disgruntled pseudo-”medical assistants” behind bullet proof plexiglass, belligerent patients complaining about waiting, and unidentified carpet stains, which became much easier to identify when an inattentive mother let her one year old run amok fouling up the room with his overloaded shit diaper. My appointment was scheduled for 2:30. I checked in at 2:15 and the receptionist told me to wait. So I waited… until 4:15 in that harbor of misery.
At 4:15 I was given a cup and directed to pee in it. Ok, can do, point me to your facilities, ma’am. There were no toilet seat covers. I’m staring down at this toilet, in a place where people go pretty much only when something is diseased or infected, and thinking, “Nuh-uh. No way. No fudging way.” I’m a typically rational person, but I’m also a bit of a mysophobe. I know the likelihood of infections being spread via toilet seat is virtually nil, but sitting on that seat seemed akin to skipping a few steps and just wiping syphilis all over myself. Normally, I’d hover – all women know how to toilet seat hover – but B. had me doing sit-ups the day before and I was too sore to hold myself in hover position. I had to pee standing up. Specifically, I had to pee into a cup whilst standing up, and I did it without spilling a drop. I’m as proud as I am ashamed.
But don’t defund Planned Parenthood, because not everyone has the requisite skills to procure illicit antibiotics. And also because there’s nothing wrong with abortions.
