Saturday 12 November 2011

Fanny-cam Japan

There are many things I hate about being pregnant, let me just list a few-
*tiredness
*heartburn
*getting horribly fat
*stretch marks
*moodiness
*not being able to drink or take drugs
*feeling like a watermelon is going to fall out of your fanny very time you walk around...

The list goes on and on, and don't even get me started on child birth, miracle of life my fucking engorged tit.

However, there is one particular aspect I'd like to focus on today, and that, is the fanny-cam. I've never actually seen a fanny-cam but I imagine it looks something like a hair curling iron, long and strait but slightly cylindrical and stainless steel. Could be way off here, but that's the image I have anyway. When you're only a little bit pregnant, they can't see the little bacteria sucking away at it's mother's vital nutrients, they need a fanny-cam for that. I've had the fanny cam about 5 times now, and that's 5 more times than I'd like, it's awful. Let me break it down for those who are interested...

First of all, you are led in to the little room by the nurse and told to strip down on the lower half.

Then you sit in the chair that lets half your bum and fanny hang out the bottom.

After that, the chair tells you in a sweet, Japanese voice over- "The chair will now move, please take care!"

And like something out of a futuristic James Bond extravaganza, the chair lifts, swivels and opens your legs so all the nurses and doctor can see what you had for breakfast.

Legs are left dangling helplessly as you lie back and just try and deal with the humiliation of it all, thanking the lord for the very Japanese style curtain that separates your flushed red face and those of the straight faced nurses and doctor.

Then, the doctor tells you to relax. Uh huh, something that I think resembles a curling iron is about to be inserted in to my vagina, not relaxin' Doc!

Once it's in it doesn't actually hurt but makes me squirm when they move it to the left and right to get pictures of my ovaries. My ovaries don't do snapshots, they're camera shy, like most of my insides!

Just yesterday I had my most recent fanny-cam and after the voice of the doctor had explained where the baby was and had poked fanny-cam around to get the shots of whatever he wanted, I was instructed to get dressed and then go and talk to the doctor. Same doctor that had just had a close encounter with my twat mind you. So I did the dress of shame and trudged in to the office to see the doctor. He started talking and after about 5 seconds actually looked at my face and gave a big surprised sound, it was my favourite doctor from when I was pregnant with Ash, I'd always liked him so I was happy to see him too, but I couldn't help thinking, 'You didn't recognise me from the fanny-cam?!' Maybe all fannies do look the same but I thought a foreign one might have given him a hint... Then again, if he'd been poking around my bits and said "Ohhhhh I remember this fanny now!!! It's the strange foreign fanny!!!" I would have been pretty freaked out too.

I'm hoping my next appointment will skip the fanny-cam and go straight to the jelly-belly ultrasounds.

23 comments:

  1. I was supposed to have one of those once but never went. My friend kept telling me they'd use a polaroid!

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  2. Oh, it's always horrible. And I think a moving chair (wtf) _might_ make it worse.
    And it does hurt! Not that the doctor would care anyway. -.- But it's not made of steel, but plastic. At least at my doctor's.

    Please feel free to vent all the shittiness of pregnancy out at us. :-) Yoroshiku~

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  3. "Pics or it didn't happen."

    Corrine may actually be an 11 year old Canadian boy who has been totally fooling us all for some weird book report on expats in Japan.

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  4. hahaha...just had one done today, but can't say that i think its quite as traumatic as you do...:)

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  5. Reason #1276 to continue channeling being a barren woman.
    222

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  6. What are they looking for? That $2 trillion the Pentagon 'lost'?
    It seems that pregnancies are super hi-tech these days

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  7. yep, my american friends call it a dildo-cam.

    at the risk of sounding pervy, i actually liked the moving chair (though the first time it spread my legs i was shocked! lol) i enjoyed many things about the clinic where i gave birth, i'm so sad it's closed now!

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  8. I am having very mixed feelings: I never saw that kind of thing done to my wife in Toronto, but have seen it in J-porn... I hope your hospital's legit...

    Are you sure they weren't just checking your cervix? If that thing's not shooting x-rays, there's no painless way they saw inside your uterus.

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  9. I had the fannycam, and I've never even been pregnant, although she (I have serious doubts about any man who becomes a gyny, it's just a bit wrong somehow)did tell me I had a beautiful uterus, which was, um, nice. I made the terrible error of going to the gym the day before and having serious muscle pain, "just relax" really wsan't an option.

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  10. Just say NO to the fanny cam!!! It's completely unnecessary and they're just squeezing all the money out of you that they can. Quack quack quack!!!!

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  11. Sorry, I just hated that thing so much, I changed doctors, cos first doc wouldn't let me refuse, I just cancelled appointments till I knew the non-intrusive scan was due, then the fucker had the nerve to SCOLD me!!!
    What I should have said first to you was congratulations!!!!!! Had my second baby 4 months ago, and soooooo happy. Well done!

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  12. I concur with Kym. Whilst I have never had a child, and, fingers crossed, have rarely sought help from the establisment of modern medicine, prefering to the health benefits that come from a daily coffee enema, I have noticed how the medical profession in Japan, like all countries, is there to take as much of your money as possible. I had an eye test once ane the optician tried to get me to buy pills for a weepy eye I'd had in 1876. I was like, fuck off.

    222

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  13. The chaaaaair! God I hate that especially because of the curtain you can see people's feet and last time the doc just waited against the wall facing me legs crossed in a very just chilling way, while my legs wear openning CREEPYYY!

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  14. "[I] have rarely sought help from the establisment of modern medicine, prefering to the health benefits that come from a daily coffee enema,"

    I think I can say without fear of exaggeration that this is them most glorious sentence I have ever read in any language anywhere. Bravo.

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  15. Sorry about those grammatical mistakes. I was distracted. I don't usually write so sloppily.
    222

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  16. It's not the grammar. I'm hardly immune myself. In my excitement I apparently felt that 'most' needed an extra 'm' before it. And frankly people who bitch about typos online are petty idiots.

    It's just, given the virtually infinite number of ways that sentence could have ended, I don't think there's anything I expected less the words 'a daily coffee enema'.

    I want that phrase on a mug. It'd look beautiful on my desk at work.

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  17. I can make you an honorary member of ACER, if you so wish. The Assoc. Of Coffee Enema Rogues.

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  18. OMG, this made me laugh so hard!
    Strange foreign fanny indeed, whahahaha!

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  19. I remember when I went to my new doctor in Akashi- I was waxed clean and as I went up in the rising chair- the nurse gasped in shock and I could hear her call the other nurses. I looked below the curtain and I saw no less than 8 pairs of feet gawking at my V. I raised the curtain and gave them all a look of disdain and they scurried away with sumimasens.

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  20. did you get at least a souvenir polaroid of your inners?

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  21. Danielle... you can't start a story with that teaser and not explain why the gasp! Should I assume you only mean that the nurse had never seen one not of her own complexion?

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  22. Ewwwwww....I am never getting pregnant.

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