Medical Matters #2 :: The Curious Profession of Digital Dr Singh

A week before I was forced to endure the disdain of Dr Payne’s inspirational needling, it was time to turn the spotlight on my shame. So I made an appointment to see a male doctor. Let’s call him Dr Singh.

Dr Singh is in his 50s. Brown and balding, unfeasibly bushy eyebrows, slug-lipped scowl.

Poor Dr Singh.

What a way to make a living. No wonder he scowled.

Really though, choosing to go into medicine at all is bad enough, but who in their right mind would choose to specialise in proctology? Not that Dr Singh did specialise in proctology of course. He’s probably something of an all-rounder. But today he was being forced to wear his proctologist’s hat. A small brown number with a shocking pink lining.

So I went in there and I sat down and I told him about my painful, bloody anus. Then I apologised. I said, ‘It can’t be pleasant. You know. All this… business.’ He kind of ignored me, maybe gave the tiniest of shrugs, maybe not. He then asked me to pull down my trousers and my underpants and to lie down on the gurney-type thing on my side and draw my knees up to my chest. Then, and there’s no other way of phrasing this, he raped me.

Actually, there are an infinite number of ways of phrasing it, and it would be tough to find one less suitable. It’s obviously incredibly crass of me to compare what took place between Dr Singh and my back door to any kind of sexual abuse. I apologise. It was however, the first time that anything which was not intended to bring me, or at least someone else, pleasure, had ever been inside me. And it really was the opposite of pleasure. It stayed with me for days too, this sensation, a palpable echo of his blunt, untender digit, burrowing away like he was foraging for truffles.

Then, when he was quite done, he said the strangest thing to me. He said, ‘I was looking for fishes.’

I was surprised. ‘Did you find any?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, you would have gone off like a rocket if I’d found any.’

I was confused. Were there really tiny brown bream living in my bottom which, when tickled with the tip of an inquisitive finger, caused internal combustion so powerful that my entire body could be propelled into space? Why hadn’t I heard about this before?

When I expressed my bewilderment, Dr Singh smilelessly explained that the fishes he sought were in fact fissures, or, if you prefer, which frankly I don’t, cracks in the anal tissue. (Bless you.)

Jesus. I feel sick even talking about all of this.

Let’s see if a little rhyme won’t dilute some of the horror.

A scowling doctor showed me love.
Let’s call him Dr Singh.
And with one hand in latex glove,
He pushed a finger in my ring.
No truffle troves were found inside,
No treasure, loaves or fissures,
No miracles of any kind,
Just piles and dirty dishes.

Eh? No. I fear no amount of winsome poesy can wipe this blog entry clean. Let’s just get it over with.

I’ve got piles. The disease of stretched mothers and desiccated old men.

Joy.

Singh asked me about my diet. I gave him a brief history. He told me to eat more greens and fibre. He also prescribed a tube of pile-zapping foam, with an applicator, to be taken internally twice a day and once again ‘after each movement’. I wasn’t keen on Dr Singh, and not just for what he did to me. I didn’t like his choice of language either. Movement. Poppycock. What a singularly inappropriate word to use when discussing one’s bowels. It brings music to the act of defecation and makes it sound positively creative, crafted. As if the morning after St Patrick’s Day, the lavatories of the world are alive with symphonies, every sweaty evacuation an Ode to Joy.

Call it what you will, Singh, for me it’s just one more dirty step toward death, one more stinking bag of body-refuse closer to oblivion, and that it must now come tainted with bright blood and agony, then coated in chemical foam, frankly disgusts me.

Anyhow. Cream seems to be working!