Swimming Fan

When I was younger I was a really strong swimmer. I used to spend all day, and as much of the night as my parents would allow, swimming and practising my strokes. When I was eleven, I took off my costume one day and I noticed that inside my vagina was a small white lump. It looked like a blister or a pimple. I touched it and it wasn’t sore, but I got scared. What was this lump? What was it doing in my vagina? Was it supposed to be there? Did everyone have this lump and I was just late in getting mine?

So after much looking at this thing and wondering about what it was (remember that this was before the days of Googling every lump and bump on your body), I went and asked my mum. Mum had a look, and said she wasn’t sure; we had better go to a doctor.

Her gynaecologist was a man, I was terrified. The door to his room was white, and the curtains were that light turquoise that I’ve now come to associate with hospitals and medicine. When I sat down on the bed, I had to take off my panties and I wasn’t sure where to put them. Should I leave them on the floor? Should I hold onto them? I didn’t really want to give them to my mum, as that would be weird. So I just held them in my hand, lay back and thought of swimming. He asked me to open my legs.

He had a look. I waited, wondering if I would ever recover from this fear. That was the most my vagina had been looked at in its life. He turned to my mum, and said “It’s just a little cyst, nothing serious. It should go away by itself.”

“By itself!” I screamed in my head. I had come all the way here, opened my legs and shown my vagina to a stranger to tell me that it would have gone away by itself. I blushed crazily and was very happy to unravel my undies and pull them on faster than I’ve ever done since then. We left and my mum tried to placate me by saying every woman had to go to the gynaecologist, and that I shouldn’t be embarrassed. I remember gazing out the car window, determinedly not looking at her.

When I got home, I realised that it wasn’t that scary. After that day though, I’d never again choose a male gynaecologist. If I want a man to look at my vagina, it’s going to be when I want him to—not for medicinal purposes.

So I went back to swimming, and thought that it was an entirely suitable activity until that time came.

Swimming fan still hates going to the gynae regardless of how this particular incident ended.