TAKE TWO ASPIRIN

Gentle Readers,

Long, long ago, when I became pregnant with Someone I Love, a lovely woman at church whispered a joke to me that she thought was quite naughty: You know how to keep from getting pregnant again? Take two aspirin and clamp them together between your knees.

I guess it worked because I never had another baby, thank you Jesus.

But man, my legs got tired.

I'm telling you this silly story because also a long time ago in another city in a different state, I worked in a nursing home. I'm sure everyone I took care of there has been dead and gone for a good long time now, and not because I killed them. Time has done its work on them.

Anyhoo, we had this patient who kept her thighs clamped together so tightly all the time that we couldn't even wash her yoohoo in the shower. We had to cath her one night and getting her legs apart was a nightmare for all of us. She was screaming as we slowly pried her open, feeling that our hands and arms might break before her legs did.

Other women we had to cath, no prob. Women are accustomed to spreading them. Most women have had sex and had babies, and it's pretty difficult to engage in either one of those activities with your thighs clamped together.

This patient had been married and had a child; thus, I'm pretty sure her legs weren't always closed like that. So I asked her why she held her thighs together.

She said, I don't know. Just habit, I guess.

What did you do when you went to the gynecologist? I then queried.

She said, What's a guy . . .  What?

I looked at an older nurse and she told me that most of the women we had in our care had never seen a gynecologist, never had a pap test, never a mammogram, never any specialized care that many of us women now take for granted.

So I write this to you now because the thought of keeping your legs closed that tightly if you want to avoid sex might never have occurred to you and perhaps the idea will be of some assistance to you and will greatly strengthen your thigh muscles I want to remind you to be grateful when you get your boobs smooshed and find out you don't have cancer or should you have it, grateful you found out before you had a tumor the size of a third boob. When you spread your legs, sometimes you can do it for a really good reason, like making sure you don't have cervical cancer.

And please be sure to prepare your daughters for their first experience with the gyno. A speculum can be quite a shock even if you have some idea of what to expect. When I saw my OB/GYN the first time I was pregnant, oi! was I dumb! It's too embarrassing to share that I took off my clothes as commanded and sat in a chair instead of getting up on the table and covering myself with the sheet because I didn't know what in the heck was going on what happened that day, but I'm sure all the nurses were laughing at me.

Another important something that our ladies in the nursing home didn't know: Wipe your butt from front to back. Older people tend to wipe from back to front, pushing feces into the yoohoo, and risking an unpleasant and uncomfortable infection. Many of our ladies had UTIs constantly, even though we tried to keep them clean and we poured cranberry juice down them.

O.K. Now you can go off and make sure you wipe your butt correctly -- everybody except Sandra at Absolutely Narcissism, who is the most constipated person on Earth and loves to write about it. She has no need to wipe.

Poor, poor Sandra, whose constipation issues give her more readers than God has.

Infinities of love,

Lola