January 18, 2010
I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled this Friday, my first since last October. Not October as in three months ago, but the October before that, right after we got engaged. I knew that engaged women need to go to the doctor and figure out “family planning.” All the Christian relationship/engagement/sex books talk about that. So within three weeks of our engagement, Matt and I were sitting in the doctor’s office talking about contraception methods. I was nervous, as I always am when going to the doctor, but overall it wasn’t too awful. I didn’t feel like she gave us too many revelations, but she did support our decision to go with birth control pills as the cheapest, most foolproof method.
She scheduled me for a pap smear the next week and said she would write me a birth control prescription when I was ready to start taking it.
The next week I went back for the pap smear and promptly regretted our decision to get married. It was SO painful. I had heard that it would be uncomfortable, but that it shouldn’t be painful. So when it hurt, I told my doctor, and she tried a smaller instrument. It still hurt, just as badly, so she stopped and said that since it was hurting, I shouldn’t have a pap smear done until after I was sexually active.
Wait. So sex is going to hurt this badly??
I tried asking her some clarifying questions to see why it was better to have my husband hurt me this much rather than a doctor.
“It won’t hurt the same when you break your hymen having sex,” she said. “It will be quicker and you’ll want to do it. It’s better than having your hymen stretched during a pap smear.”
I walked out of the exam room with a newfound awe for every married woman I saw. I stared at the receptionist’s wedding ring as I turned in my paperwork after the appointment. How did she endure such pain? How is she so happy, calm, and normal?
I walked bowlegged for two days after that attempted pap smear, and it wasn’t even a FULL procedure! She never even got near the cervix!
So here we are, over a year later.
Our insurance has changed, so I’m going to a new doctor. Sex doesn’t hurt anymore (that is a story for another self-disclosing post), and I’m pretty sure my hymen is stretched enough to handle the pap smear this time.
But my general fear of doctors and my memory of the last pap smear are not making it easy to approach this next appointment with peace. What if she isn’t gentle enough? Honestly, the idea of anything touching my cervix still weirds the heck out of me, the same kind of feeling I get when someone tries to stick a finger in my belly button. It’s not painful, exactly, but it’s intolerable.
So that’s where I’m at this week…dreading Friday’s cold, sterile table, barely-there paper gown, and awkward stirrups. I guess it seems a little silly to pray about a pap smear in light of global tragedies like Haiti’s earthquake, but thankfully God is big enough to handle both. I will be praying during that appointment and asking for supernatural peace. I’ll let you know how it goes. Fortunately, I have Avatar to look forward to on Saturday as a reward for my suffering on Friday.
P.S. Something funny: When I showed this post to Matt, he said, “Wow. That’s really self-disclosing. But I like it. It’s from the heart…or from the cervix.”
I’ve determined that blog writing is difficult in the early stages. It’s the awkward time when you don’t really know who your audience is yet. And if you don’t have an audience in mind when you’re writing, writer’s block is pretty much guaranteed. At least for me. Maybe I’m too much of a people pleaser, but I’d like to think it’s because I’m a decent writer. I write in completely different styles, about completely different topics, and with varying levels of self-disclosure depending on who I imagine I’m writing to.
So I’m still playing around with who I think I’m writing to on this blog.
Ideally, we want to grow our readership and speak to people we don’t even know about super intimate topics (like how I’m terrified of my first married pap smear coming up soon). But for now, our readers mostly consist of close friends who click on our Facebook links and may not want to know about my pap smear fears. Hence, we continue writing glib, simplistic posts. You see the conundrum, right?
To remedy this problem, I will begin categorizing posts based on level of self-disclosure versus topics. That way, those of you who are totally weirded out by TMI about our marriage, our bodily functions, or emotions in general can skip to the more light-hearted posts (like about food and martial arts) or the strictly theological posts.
Matt’s not home right now and I haven’t talked to him about this (communication is very key in a healthy marriage, you know), so we may change this system up. But for now, look for the categories. I’m going to try out the new system by posting two more posts. One highly self-disclosing, one minimally self-disclosing with lots of theological pondering. Read accordingly.
December 9, 2009
I get this question a lot. ”So… how’s married life?” I often find it hard to explain, since I don’t go through my day thinking about how things are different now that I am no longer single. I usually respond with, “Umm… it’s good.”
Sitting down and thinking about it, there’s a lot that’s different about married life. To let you know, I have: lived in my parents’ home (20 years, baby!), in a dorm at school, and with four other guys in a house. Marriage is very different from all three of them, especially the last one. In fact, it’s kind of funny to think of how different living with four guys is from one woman. Here’s the breakdown:
Laundry: It was a glorious day the first day after the wedding that I rushed off to my Wushu class. I had thought that my workout shirt would be sweaty and smelly from the last class, but magically it was clean and hung in the closet. It was as if the laundry fairies had visited our apartment!
Cooking: Before getting married, I lived with Dan Matundan, a graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Chicago. The other guys liked cooking too, not to mention myself. I seriously gained fat and weight when I lived there (more on that later). We had food all the time. There were always leftovers, and when there weren’t there was someone cooking. We had meat pretty much every meal, and always extra.
Cooking for two is a bit different than for five. We eat well, but I notice that food goes bad in the fridge a lot more often than in the other house. On the other hand, I am eating less meat, more vegetables, and less overall.
Date Night Every Night: Well, maybe not every night. Not too much staying up late and talking, either. But, it is nice not to have to “go home” at the end of the night. Movie nights, eating in… I’m a fan.
Sex: Well, let’s just say it didn’t happen before and it does now, end of story.
When we went to China, our professor told us to take pictures, journal, and remember what it was to first see things. He told us this because we would soon take the differences for granted, and forget the differences. I think the same thing about marriage, remember the nice little things before they settle into regular life.
October 2, 2009
We interrupt this series of deep, thought-provoking blog posts to present a post entirely devoted to the disgusting capabilities of the human body. Warning: graphic content ahead. You may want to quit now. But for those with strong stomachs and strong curiosity, I (Angel) will give you some insight into recent dietary changes I’ve been making. Some of you may be aware that I’ve started cutting out regular milk from my diet and drinking only soy milk. I have participated in short “detox” fasts a couple of times in the past, so I had switched to soy milk before for limited times and don’t mind the flavor. (Rice milk, however, is a whole other story. Not a fan.) Anyway, this current switch is not for the purpose of getting healthier bowel movements, finding spiritual enlightenment, or encouraging self-discipline. It came after I dislodged this baby from my tonsils:
Tonsil Stone next to a penny
The penny was not in my throat. That’s just there to give perspective on the monstrous size of the tonsil stone that was in my throat. Since many people have never heard of tonsil stones, I’ll give you the run down. They are essentially lumps of old food particles, bacteria, old mouth cells, and white blood cells. (See more detailed info here.) I have always had these things, for as long as I can remember, and thought they were a normal part of life that everyone deals with. It makes sense, especially if you still have tonsils, like I do. You eat food, you swallow most of it, some gets stuck and eventually goes down later. Occasionally an old piece of food would come out (usually very small in size, like a speck) and it smelled really gross. I still felt like that was normal. After all, decayed, old food should probably smell pretty awful. Then last year, I was at a family party and a big one (not quite as big as the one above) came out. I showed it to Matt and a few other family members, not thinking much of it, other than it was funny that such a big one had formed before being broken down and swallowed. I had even had a sore throat for the week before and thought I was getting sick, but after the “stone” came out, I realized it had just been rubbing on my throat every time I swallowed and had made my throat sore. After Matt and all of my family members told me they did not think it was normal, they had never seen anything like that before, and I should go to the doctor, I decided to research it online. I hate going to the doctor, so I do everything I can first to check stuff out before going. It turned out that these weren’t as common as I thought (not everyone deals with them), but they are still fairly common. After a bunch of research, I found out that they are more common for people who are lactose intolerant, and eating a lot of dairy contributes to them. Also, alcohol contributes to them. While I don’t drink alcohol, I am religious about my mouthcare routine, as anyone who has lived with me knows. I was gargling mouthwash (with 20% alcohol content) twice a day every day, not realizing that was actually contributing to the problem. I also am a huge dairy lover and over the past couple of years have ingested quite a lot of ice cream. I eat cereal with milk almost every day and often drink milk throughout the day. My mom has dealt with lactose intolerance for many years, and I was worried that someday I would develop it. The increasing size of my tonsil stones seems to be indicating that that day has arrived.
Over the past year since that big stone came out at the family party, I knew in the back of my mind I probably should do something about my diet and start using a tongue scraper regularly (to help minimize the amount of bacteria at the back of the throat). I didn’t know about the mouthwash problem until recently, but I had found that gargling diluted hydrogen peroxide helped clear them out, so I thought about doing that every day, but was too lazy. Tonsil stones would form occasionally, but nothing major enough to change my habits. Then that sucker in the picture above formed in the side of my throat. It was hard, big, and stuck behind a little flap of skin that made it difficult for me to push it out with my tongue. It stayed in there for over two weeks and drove me crazy. In my desperation to get it out, I went back to researching online. I found an amazing tonsil stones website that offered a lot of practical suggestions from a guy who also has had tonsil stones all his life. That was the site that taught me about the mouthwash problem and recommended gargling with grapefruit oil extract to get rid of stones and keep them from forming. I ordered some of the extract, started gargling with that and hydrogen peroxide every day, started using my tongue scraper regularly, and within a few days, the monstrosity came out. I decided to take a picture of it to remind myself of how badly I needed to change my habits so these things stop forming. A few days later, I switched to soy milk and am in the process of swearing off dairy ice cream forever. (We still have a little left in the freezer, and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste 
) Happily, I found some soy ice cream at Trader Joe’s yesterday which isn’t too bad. It’s definitely not real ice cream, but it’s close enough to make me happy.
I've added grapefruit seed extract and hydrogen peroxide gargling to my daily routine
Trader Joe's Soy Creamy Mango Vanilla Flavor
Through it all, Matt has been the best husband. Last night, my dietary changes and two weeks of regularly gargling GSE and HP paid off. We were sitting in bed talking, reading, and watching “The Office,” and through it all I was pulling tonsil stones out and depositing them on kleenex. Matt didn’t get mad or disgusted (that he let on, anyway). He is very supportive and encouraging in the face of my smelly tonsils. He even checked with a flashlight afterward to see if there were any more left. Ahhh, true love. And he has been drinking soy milk with me. Quite the gentleman.
Look at all the vitamins in soy milk!
So now when I refrain from ice cream and milk in your presence, you’ll know why. I’ll keep you updated on how the new diet goes, but won’t plan to post any new pictures of tonsil stones that come out unless we get some intense interest. It really is pretty gross. Hopefully this post is enough to explain without further need for disgusting photos.