CHAPTER 5
(Of course there is no chapter four. Mǎmá Lu would faint at having the number four—which in Mandarin sounds like the word for death, therefore making it unlucky—as a chapter number.)
RASH DECISIONS
THERE COMES A TIME WHEN every parent must have the ever-important sex talk with their child. Unfortunately for me, my version consisted of the following: Sex is a crime before marriage and an obligation for a wife, and, Do not get a Pap smear or use a tampon because you will deflower yourself prematurely. How will your future husband know your looseness is from that tool they use, not another penis?
None of that was useful, well, ever. So when a burning itch hit me down below, I had no idea what the problem could be, and my only solution was to scratch it by squirming.
Around three in the morning, my chair was about to lose its upholstering. The itch was so intense I’d even endure the cow’s hoof to cure it. I had no choice but to—God forbid—look at it. I knew I had to get over my uneasiness with nether regions before becoming a doctor, but I thought I had more time. It wasn’t that I was afraid of my body—more like I didn’t know what to do with it.
I closed the bathroom door and dragged the trash can in front since there were no locks. Then I undressed and took a deep breath. With my right foot propped on the sink, my hands grasping the wall, and a flashlight between my teeth, I tried to get a look at my vagina in the mirror. Well, not my vagina exactly—more distal, in the crease and spilling over onto my inner thigh.
The door opened.
The germ-ridden trash can careened into me, and I lost my balance. The flashlight fell from my lips, my scream echoed down the hallway, and I crumpled into a heap on the floor. Shockingly, my first thought was not my nakedness; it was the dirty communal bathroom floor.
I glanced through my sprawled arms to see a stranger peering in concern. A boy. Of course. Now my nakedness took top billing.
“Get out!”
“Sorry! The doors—they don’t lock!” His arm was draped over his eyes, but his tinted cheeks screamed, Yes, I saw your lady parts!
I picked myself up and slammed said door. “No shit, Sherlock! Why’d you kick it in?”
“I thought it was stuck!” Pause. “You, uh, might want to get that checked out. It’s pretty red.”
“Oh my God, stop talking!”
My cheeks flushed the same shade as my rash. I wanted to chuck the flashlight at the mirror to shatter the maladjusted girl staring back at me.
With my pants only half zipped, I flung the door open, flew past the boy whose face would be forever burned into my memory, and made my way straight to the MIT medical clinic, or “MIT Medical,” as we called it.
Two hours into my wait at Urgent Care, I had fully zipped my pants and ticked through a list of possible diseases crawling on my chair. I scooted my butt to the edge, which made the itching worse. When my squirming attracted the attention of my neighbor, I scanned the room, wondering how many of my fellow waiting room patrons knew what was going on in my head—or worse, down below. What did they think I was in for? Anxiety meds? Something to help me sleep because I was an overstrung Asian? I fumed at the stereotypical assumptions, then hated myself for being the one who’d come up with them.
I watched a bug-eyed boy scan the room with shifty glances as if he were guilty of something. My guess? Something totally awkward straight out of American Pie. His eyes caught mine once, then stayed away.
I watched two frat guys, not because they were attractive, but because it was impossible not to stare at a car wreck. Their voices projected the names of all the girls they’d “banged” this week, making it clear that their mothers were their only female visitors. My guess? They were waiting for a friend to recover from alcohol poisoning.
“Me-eye?” The nurse looked up from her clipboard. “Is that supposed to be Mia? Mia Lu?”
I raised my hand like a nerd, taking the name butchering in stride thanks to a lifetime of practice. At least Mia was a pretty name—poor Tze-Hsing Nguyen was always demoted to Huh?
I tried to settle onto the exam table, but the paper crinkled with every wriggle, demanding unwanted attention. My thighs locked together even though I knew I would have to flash my goods in a few minutes.
“What brings you here today, Mia?”
“I, uh, have a rash.” I pointed to my vagina. “It itches. And it’s red.” Or so I was told.
The nurse asked the usual questions and left me to change into the dreaded hospital gown, which provided as much coverage as my discount mobile carrier.
Then the awaited knock at the door.
Please be a female. Please be a female. Please be a—
“I’m going to look at your rash,” said the male Indian doctor with a heavy accent. Without meeting my eye, he unceremoniously pushed my gown aside and looked for a second. Just one.
“It’s herpes,” he said to the nurse, still avoiding eye contact.
A strange garbled noise escaped from my throat before I managed to rasp, “That’s impossible.”
He ignored me and threw several packs of surgical hand scrubs onto the table. “Use those. Then see a gynecologist.”
“I can’t have herpes. It’s physically impossible. Unless I got them from a toilet seat, or the bathroom floor . . . or a pair of pants”—I glanced down at the brand-new jeans I had on—“but according to the latest studies, that’s not possible.”
The doctor gestured for the nurse to explain why I was wrong, then left the room.
“Don’t worry. There’s patient confidentiality,” she said, monotone. “We won’t tell your parents you’re sexually active. Now, would you like a pregnancy test today?”
My voice rose. I wanted the itching to stop, but more so, the nonsense. “Wouldn’t herpes hurt? This isn’t painful, only itchy. And since when is herpes treated by scrubbing it? None of this makes sense!”
“You don’t have to be embarrassed. There’s no judgment here. Now, pregnancy test?”
I shoved the hand scrubs into my bag and hopped off the table. “No thanks. You’d probably tell me I’m pregnant.”
“Then you need a test. If you’re pregnant, we can help you. There are people you can talk to.”
Grabbing my clothes in a huff, I stormed out in just my gown, my inner volcano—aka Lu-suvius—bubbling ominously.
Across the hall, I pushed the bathroom door open. And there, crouched over the toilet, her arm disappearing into the hole, was a slim Asian female in a white coat.
“What the hell?” I took a second to compose myself, then said, “May I ask why you’re fishing for poo?” I desperately wished this wasn’t something I’d have to do in the future as a doctor. Was this really the best way to retrieve bowel samples? Just the thought made me need to bend over the toilet myself.
“I dropped gauze in here,” she said in a you’re-clueless tone.
“Are you kidding me? Just flush it.”
She regarded me as the weird one just as a nitrile-gloved hand emerged with the evil gauze. “I can’t do that. It’ll clog the toilet.”
“How is that any different from toilet paper? And don’t you regularly flush much larger things? If not, we really must write the author of Everyone Poops. They’ll have to rename it Everyone Poops . . . Except ”—I glanced at her name tag—“Dr. Chang.”
She dumped her gloves in the biohazard bin. “Huh. You’re right. I never thought about that. Maybe that’s why the janitor stopped responding to my emails about retrieving stuff from the toilets. It’s just that, my parents always told me anything foreign in the toilet would clog it, including tissues, cotton swabs, gauze. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I waited for her to say something else, something that would clarify things a little more, but she just walked past me, completely silent, her head lowered and shoulders hunched. Since I knew that level of embarrassment intimately, I let her pass without meeting her eyes.
After changing and leaving the flimsy robe in a heap on the floor, I slunk home, a spitting image of the mysterious Dr. Chang.