Monday, Dec. 6 09
SENDING A WOMAN TO DO A MAN’S JOB.
ROY GARDE
My nurse had to physically stop my new patient’s wife from going into the examination room with him although she
could see from the troubled look in his eyes that he’d much rather that she be allowed to accompany him.
When she had taken his temperature and his pulse and his blood pressure, and the rest of it, she came and told me that he was ready for me and I gave him the usual ten minute wait – to establish control and for my image’s sake: ‘busy, busy, busy’ – and then I went in and read the figures before giving him a full examination.
He was thirty-three years old and was in excellent shape and didn’t have an ounce of fat on his muscular body. When I complimented him on it he shrugged it away saying that if a man works on a farm from sun up to sun down seven days a week, “ – he’s not going to get much fat on his bones.”
When I asked him, gently, what was the real reason for his visit – when his wife had called to make the appointment she’d been vague about his having an ailment that the doctor in their nearby village couldn’t seem to deal with – he became almost totally tongue tied and he looked so miserable that I stopped pestering him. Clearly it had to be of a sexual nature to affect him like that and although I’m first and foremost a urology surgeon I make the jam for my bread and butter – I’m always careful to park some of that jam around the back of the building in an effort to spare patients from having feelings of resentment – through treating men with ED problems and it was evident that he wasn’t the kind of man who could bring himself to discuss it in general with a stranger, doctor or not, no matter about giving details. I knew from long experience that it would take far too much of my time to attempt to eek it out of him in dribbles so I told him to get dressed and that I’d be back in a few minutes.
I asked his wife to come into my office and I closed the door and then I took out a questionnaire that I’d had printed for that very reason and I started with the straightforward questions that would get her to outline their life history. I’d designed the form to let me slip in spontaneous questions when appropriate so as to find out the personal and private details that are essential for me to know in order to work out which treatment for ailments of this kind would be most likely to succeed.
It turned out that their names were Margaret – ‘Maggie’ – and John – ‘Jack’ – Merriman and they’d known each other since they were two years old and had played together just about everyday and had gone through grade school and high school in the same classes. They had gotten married when they were twenty years old and he had worked on her family’s farm as a laborer until her father died a few years later and he’d then taken over the running of it. Her mother still lived with them.
They’d had four children and the youngest one was just over six.
I’d spent a lot of time and thought on the questionnaire and I’d long ago found that it helped if I asked every question in a flat voice, and kept my eyes looking down at the page, but I didn’t need to use much of that guile with Maggie because I soon found out that she was as extroverted as her husband was introverted.
She freely offered the information that I needed and that saved me a good deal of time.
Neither of them had ever had any sexual contact with anyone else and they’d had an active love life since they were fifteen years old. Before they were married they’d only had intercourse in the standard, missionary position – which is the norm because it’s all so new and so exciting then and, besides that, every opportunity for them to get it on has to be carefully orchestrated and is necessarily short – but after their wedding they did a whole lot of experimenting and although she euphemized what they both liked doing most as ‘going down on each other’ I eventually found out that in fact their practice of oral sex was extensive and imaginative. She explained that away by saying that they’d had a whole lot of time to use up in their cottage next to the main house because it gets dark early in the winter and they didn’t have television until they moved into the big house which they did after the birth of their second child when they swapped homes with her mother.
They’d tried anal sex once – she said that they’d often heard tell of it and they’d agreed that the fact that it was out there made it mandatory that they try it and they saved up the experience for his twenty-first birthday as a special treat – and she’d gotten nothing out of it except pain and it had taken so much out of him that he hadn’t wanted to touch her for about three days afterwards which had seemed like a month to her because they were very much into indulging themselves freely at that time. As a result of that double whammy they’d decided to not do it that way again and they never had.
To answer a tentative question of mine about porn she told me that around four years earlier their eldest son had fixed them up with access to the internet and they’d both learned to browse and they inevitably got introduced to porn and the site that they liked best was where the various positions of the Karma Sutra were shown in slow motion so that they could follow along with any that took their fancy. She remembered the ‘wheelbarrow’ position with fondness because although it put him in charge overall, “as usual,” she could make wonderful things happen for herself with comparatively little effort by simply angling her hips in certain ways which helped her to climax several times while he was single-mindedly, “as usual,” trying to get one for himself. She dealt with his oft stated complaints, when they were resting afterwards, about having to frequently stop moving and wait for her to quit clamping down and open up and cooperate with him again by telling him that that was, “part of the suggested procedure” and that was true, as far as he knew, in that he left the details up to her because he always stopped listening to the commentary as soon as each new position was demonstrated on the screen because he couldn’t keep from beginning to try it out.
All in all I found that they’d had a healthier and a much more active and more varied love life than your average couple, which brought us to the reason for their visit to me.
It was a shocker. They hadn’t made love of any sort for nearly two years.
She told me that several months before their visit to me she’d seen from the calendar – the one that she used to police her birth-control-pill taking which she’d been doing unbeknownst to him because “four kids are plenty thank you although he’d be happy if I produced one every year from now to an early grave” – that it had actually been a whole year since he’d asked her, “What do you say to a little loving, lil’ darlin’?” and that fact had stirred her up enough to go out and try to do something about it.
She told me that going without it over all that time had affected her badly but it had affected him much more because, “he was the one with the full testicles that never stopped telling him that they wanted to be emptied.”
She went on to say, “Just as serious as the loss of all the pleasure that should have come for us, Doctor, his not getting any has undermined his capacity for work and for most of the time since then he’s done only the minimum, only the unavoidable, chores on our farm.”
My next question concerned the efforts and methods that they’d used as a couple to attempt to make him get a viable erection.
She said that porn was out because, through not being able to ‘get it up’ himself, he couldn’t bear to watch it anymore because the guys invariably had huge erections.
She went on, unabashedly because she had by then completely gotten over her few inhibitions, that nothing that she did for him with her mouth or her hands or any other part of her body helped him to get hard and they knew that all too well because his needs and his anguish made him ask her daily to try to get a response. Which she did and which he didn’t.
They’d tried a long list of herbs and old country cures, including making chicken dung and boiled nettles into a poultice, but to no avail.
When she’d realized that they’d been suffering for a full year she, over his strenuous objections, made him go with her to their local doctor and he’d given her free samples of the three available ED treatment pills to try on him, in turn. None of them had made ‘it’ so much as raise its head, or even stir. After the third one failed their doctor gave up and he suggested that she call me for an appointment.
I thanked her for her frankness and then I told her to please go back to the waiting room and that I’d go and see her husband again.
I had another set of prepared questions for recalcitrant patients in that situation but try as I might I couldn’t get much more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ out of him. When I asked him the question whose preamble is “No doubt you know that there are ways to make love without having to penetrate . . . ” a horrified look came to his face even though his wife had just gotten through telling me that he asked her to ‘go down’ on him every day.
Just about the only complete sentence that he put together was after I’d asked him if he’d ever watched porn on the Internet and he said, “Doctor, I work with animals all day but I’m not one myself.”
I didn’t say anything for a few minutes after that and I tried to keep the images from forming in my mind of him being the prime mover while the ‘wheelbarrow’ was being maneuvered around the bedroom, with frequent stops.
Anyway, by then it was time to give up on the questions – I’d already spent close to an hour with the two of them and although I didn’t have any other patients waiting to see me there are sound business practices to consider and not setting new and dubious precedents has to be borne in mind at all times – so I got down to business by telling him that his wife had told me about his having tried the three different ED pills and that that left us with just one thing more to try.
A penile implant.
You’d have thought that I’d recommended castration from the way that he reacted.
When he’d gotten over the shock he stood up and barely stopped himself from cursing at me and, as it was, he didn’t manage so much as a “Good day, Doctor.” or a “Thank you, Doctor.” as he bolted out of the room and called for his wife as he headed for the front door.
She made the much used TV comedy gesture of holding her hand up to her ear, signifying that she’d call me on the telephone, and then she contorted her face as if to say ‘what can you do with men’ and then hurried to catch up with him.
Having seen the strength of will that she had I was pretty sure that I’d see them both again and in the not too distant future.
She called the following day and she wouldn’t talk to my receptionist except to repeatedly ask to talk to me. When I got on the phone she asked me about the procedure and the pain involved and the healing time and the cost and I answered all her questions, including how to get her insurance company to pay for most of it, and she thanked me and then she got a little coy – she obviously wanted to ask me another question but was having difficulty getting it out directly – and she started rambling on and it took me a little while to understand that she wanted to know how big his penis would be afterwards and could they pick the size they wanted!
I explained that the size would be determined by how much I had to work with initially but that usually the permanent end result was around seventy percent of the maximum size of the patient’s ‘normal’ erection but that could well be augmented ‘naturally’ when he got excited. She was delighted to hear that and she giggled and gurgled like a young bride as she thanked me profusely but when I tried to say goodbye she said that she had one more question but again she had difficulty with getting it out and it was experience alone that got me to eventually understand that he, not to mention she, wanted to know how he could walk around, no matter about do any work, with a permanent erection “waving around and about down there?”
I told her about the modified jock straps that we have available and, although she sounded dubious when I assured her that that wouldn’t be a problem for him after a day or two, there was relief in her voice as she thanked me and then said that she’d call me back as soon as she could.
I took that last bit to mean as soon as she could twist his arm enough.
The operation went smoothly, he’d insisted on being completely anaesthetized not just locally and there was no surprise there, and we’d let him go home that afternoon after we’d given him the written instructions for him to ignore and had given his wife the verbal ones that would be, no doubt, followed to a T.
As he was being wheel-chaired to their car she got me to hang back and then asked me to please answer one further question.
She kept her eyes on my tie as she asked, “When it has healed up and is available for use permanently won’t he want to be doing it to me all day and all night long?”
I told her that she wasn’t to worry because Nature was on her side in that empty testicles brings surcease of unruly urges and, anyway, once the novelty had worn off she would be back in charge again and that would probably be before a week of resumed relations had gone by.
I had grown to like Maggie, I make it a strict rule of mine to avoid that happening with patients but she had infiltrated my defenses somehow, so I as I was walking down the corridor with her I counseled her again about following my instructions carefully in that it was a good idea for them to have intercourse only in the conventional way for the first few weeks – after, of course, the usual amount of time that was required to let the wounds heal properly – and to go at it as slowly as was possible the first time and then I added that she was to remember that it had been well over a year since he’d last ejaculated successfully and consequently he would feel the passage of his spermatozoa from his testicles all the way up and around, until it became semen when it had been mixed with fluids from his prostate, and then on until it got to be injected into her. “Clearly,” I told her, “it would have to force its way all along the system because of its being out-of-use for so long.” I told her that she should warn him to not be unduly alarmed by the strange feeling.
“I’ll do that, Doctor, thank you for telling me and thank you again for all that you’ve done for us. We have hope now. We’re very grateful.”
She called the office two weeks later and when she’d talked her way through my receptionist and had gotten me on the phone she greeted me and thanked me yet again and then I heard –
“Come over here, Jack. The clever Doctor is on the phone. Tell him what we said.”
– – – – – – – “Hello? Ah yes, Doctor. I want to thank you for what you did. It – uh – it works well – uh – thank you, again. Here, take it back Maggie.”
– – – – – – – “Ah. All right then. Uh . . . Wait a minute, please Doctor.”
She covered the mouthpiece then but I still heard her saying, “Listen Jack, go away for a minute will you? I want to ask him something that doesn’t concern you. Women’s problems, you know?”
And then, “Ah. Hello? Yes, ah, listen to me for another minute, please Doctor, if you’re not too busy that is? . . . Right, good. Well the thing is – I might be able to help your other patients. The ones in future who have this done, I mean.
“In the weeks that we waited for it to heal I did some thinking and it occurred to me that it would be best if I – uh – went down on him the first time and that that was the wise thing to do for two reasons: The first one was that all through that long time of nothing happening between us he made me comfort him with my mouth before we went to sleep most nights, as I told you already, and sometimes before he got out of bed in the morning too, and, as I also told you, I failed to as much as make it lift its head over all of that time. Well, I felt such a failure and his need was always so strong that it was heartbreaking for me not being able to help him. So. I figured that here was the chance, the golden opportunity you might say, to wipe away all of that sorrow and all of those bad memories and that I should take full advantage of it. I knew that I wouldn’t have to try to get him hard anymore and I could concentrate on getting him to actually – uh – come into my mouth, if you’ll excuse my crudeness but I don’t know any other way to put it, that first time and if I could do it that would be a triumph for me, right? Memorable. Right? Do you see what I’m getting at, Doctor?”
“Yes, indeed I do. Excellent thinking. Well done. But listen, Maggie, I’m naturally very interested in everything that happens following operations of this kind so please go on. You said there were two reasons for doing it orally the first time. What was the second one?”
“Yes. Well, you told me that the first time might be strange or even painful for him – didn’t you? . . . Yes. – so I figured that if I had it in my mouth I’d be the one in charge and I could see to it that it happened nice and slow and lovingly and, also, doing it that way would see to it that his poor, wounded – uh – thing wouldn’t get bruised or hurt too much. Besides that, I figured that I’d be right there, up close, to comfort his – uh – his balls and to press on his belly to slow things down in there and if I was clever enough to pick the right moment to change it from being the usual ‘blow-job,’ as he calls it and which is really a suck-job, to an actual blow-job at just the right time I might well be able to create some hold back pressure to get it to come out slowly and smoothly without – ah – jetting and sputtering all along his – uh – his inner tubing, you might say, right?
“Well, Doctor, it all worked out well and it happened just as I hoped and you could have heard him holler in triumph and relief clear across the lower forty.
“As for me, such a feeling of calm came over me that I near to melted into the mattress.
“And then, as he was resting, something came to my mind that you might be interested in hearing – Well, I’m wondering if I’m the first woman ever to work out where the name ‘blow-job’ comes from! I’m thinking that long ago in – uh – maybe ancient Egypt, it might have been a therapeutic way, like mine was with my Jack, to check out each one of their boy kings’ sexual – uh – abilities in a really careful way!”
She cackled with pride at her cleverness and then she said, “Wow! What a relief this had been for both of us. It’s changed our lives for the better, that’s for sure. Well, to continue with my report – since then we’ve done it often in the normal position and I’m glad to say that it’s as good as ever it was for both of us. So, now we’re thinking of being a bit more adventurous in bed our own selves before we get back on that there Internet thing. So. Thanks a million, Doctor. It would have been worth it to us at ten times the price. Goodbye Doctor and, uh, we’ll be sure to recommend you to anybody. Ah! No. That’s not true. I should have said that I’ll be sure to recommend you to anybody. My Jack would rather die than admit that he got anything like that done. Well. G‘bye again, Doctor. We’re both very grateful.”
Once again I was somewhat taken aback with her explicitness and that lasted until I remembered the time that a friend of mine had invited me to go with him when he took his mare to be serviced at a breeding farm.
First the teaser was brought in – it was obvious that he was ready to go because his penis was so extended that the end of it actually bounced on the floor a few times when the poor animal was being led in – and when the mare clearly showed that she was ready too, by prancing and kicking up a storm while presenting herself blatantly, they dragged the poor teaser away and his near-to-frantic struggles to get back to her made his penis bounce around a whole lot more and it picked up a coating of dirt and grass and pebbles that covered about six inches of it! (As an aside – I can never think about that teaser without reminding myself to try to find out if they’re ever allowed to actually mount a mare as a kind of reward and what is their life expectancy compared to a stud and to a gelding?)
When the prize stallion was brought in the breeder was kept busy positioning and re-positioning some pads of matting to try to protect it from being kicked by the mare and consequently it was the breeder’s wife who was the one who had to come to the rescue when the stallion had mounted and was doing some ineffectual, potentially self-harming, thrusting. She picked her moment and then she reached in to pull the mare’s tail out of the way and then used her other hand to guide the head of the penis up to the swollen and pulsing, saucer-sized vulva.
And then, when the act had been carried out successfully and the stallion had dismounted, it was the woman who had to wield a long handled ladle to catch the costly semen that dripped from the end of its slackened and rapidly disappearing penis as it was being led away.
On remembering that it came to me that clearly Maggie and the breeder’s wife share common ground while doing a common task.
They are both farmers’ wives and, as such, all aspects of mating and breeding are dealt with expeditiously by them while ignoring the capricious whims of the males that they’re involved with.
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