It just sorta is what it is. Brenna's had to tolerate incursions like this at the doctor forever, they're commonplace - omnipresent, like sax solos in the eighties. Until I paid a man and his inexplicably present assistant to sterilize me a decade or so ago, zealous strangers interacting with my most secret places were pretty thin on the ground. Now I've entered a phase of life where doctors just slap your shit around and it's not super clear why.

I was worried about it way before I needed to be. I had read that it was supposed to happen when I was thirty two, and so I went in there for my checkup with the expectation that I was going to be split in half and when it seemed like the checkup was over and it hadn't happened, I dared to hope. My instinct was to run to the car, but I had to verify.

"Is it time to do the thing?" I said, extending my thumb and then jerking it back a couple times, like I was hailing a cab. He looked at me with suspicion; like I was trying to order something off-menu. "Are you asking me to do that?" he said.

"I am not," I replied.

People are always asking for it, he said. That… okay. Wow. This guy has a weird job.

He said they used to do "that" much earlier and now they don't do it until much later. Late enough that I worried for a really, really long time for literally no reason. Now it's sort of a Russian Roulette situation, where every time I go to the doctor I wonder if this is gonna be the time. Like, if somebody is gonna jump out of a planter like a goblin, long nails, no gloves, wide grin splitting its head open like a PEZ dispenser.

(CW)TB out.