An old woman enters the consultation room, walking a bit awkward with her legs spread very wide.
She has great difficulty explaining what her problem is, but it’s “something down there” (it usually is in the urologist’s office), and it’s “big.”
The woman avoids the urologist’s eyes every which way, even when she talks about “the problem down there,” and when she is asked to undress — how else would the urologist find out what the poor woman is mumbling about ? — she sighs, lowers her head even more, sighs again and undresses.
The “thing down there” is indeed big, and it is hanging in between the patient’s legs. It is almost entirely black, must have smelled pretty badly once but not anymore, and its very color reveals that it must have been hanging there for ages. A uterus — her uterus.
Apparently it prolapsed more than five years ago, and whatever the patient tried she couldn’t push it back in there (that is to say, it never stayed in there). And as her 81-year-old husband needed a lot of attention due to his bad health, she turned into a systematic procrastinator because she was too ashamed to go to the doctor’s and show her condition, and because she had a good reason now to forget about herself.
And so she cooked dinner with the thing hanging down there, she sat on the thing while eating supper, she slept with the thing (which felt like a cold cushion) in between her legs, and she peed & pooed as well with the thing lying on the toilet’s seat (if possible). She also washed the thing under the shower so that it was almost impeccably clean, but she can’t deny that it looked worse and worse over the years.
(Maybe the strangest thing of all was that her husband never even noticed her womb hanging inside-out. Or at least he didn’t say.)
The doctor seems totally mesmerized by the sight of it all, but doesn’t say a word at first. Then she looks at the patient and smiles. Because this patient took a giant step to enter the consultation room after five years of suffering and denial, and she should be helped ASAP.
And that’s exactly what will happen —