Cervixes, cranberries & cherries

I've had a day today which would be weird by normal standards, now I come to think about it. It started out with a pathology tutorial in which we were all given preserved specimens to look at; of a cervix, of a testicle, and of a bunch of different uteruses, in different stages of age, disease, and sliced-ness. This wasn't as gory as it might sound; bits of person which have been surgically excised (with consent, don't worry) and then put in formaldehyde for upwards of a year bear about as much resemblance to living bleeding human flesh as devon does to steak.

I spent the rest of the morning sitting in with my Dad as Medical Student of The Day while he saw patients, and did pap smears, and scanned babies in utero, and biopsied cervixes (cervices?) and checked other cervixes to see if ladies had broken their waters and that sort of thing. This was also all very well in a sort of grown up Take Your Kid To Work Day sort of way, and I strongly suspect him of secretly trying to market his specialty to me and get me to follow in his footsteps (which I'm sure he'd strenuously deny, but which wouldn't fool a babe in arms).

The problem with watching someone else work, though, is that no matter how interesting and rewarding it is to do, and to think your way through, and all that, watching someone have pretty similar conversations with a bunch of people over and over again is an awful lot like watching someone else play Mario Kart. You (or anyway, I) are mildly entertained by the scenery, and you'd sort of lke to have a turn, but you know you're not really that good at Mario Kart, so if you tried, you'd spend the entire time trying to turn around after accidentally crashing and ending up facing backwards (ok, so that may be a slightly overdrawn analogy there, but you get the gist). I mean, sure seeing a lot of ladies' bits and pieces (if you will) is an unusual way to spend a morning, but by 11 o'clock it's no more unusual and intriguing than spending a morning looking at the undersides of cars, or anything else you usually don't see many of.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch my Dad at work, and I got to play with a super-great toddler who wanted to take me home with her, which is nice, and I definitely learned a few Important Facts, which is really all you can ask in life. I figure if I learn and retain one single Fact every day at uni, then I'm doing alright, all in all. Especially when you consider that lower case f facts and broader understandings are probably sneaking into my brain on the way past.

Probably the best fact from this last week is that cranberry juice, far from being actually helpful for UTIs like I'd always been told, is a bladder irritant. And not in an "it irritates your bladder into fighting the infection" way, either. Looks like if you make an effort to drink a bunch of water and have enough vitamins on board, you've effectively done yourself as much good as cranberry juice is supposed to, without all that pesky bladder-being-hurt-more on the way past. Frankly, it bugs me that this is the case. Like, what the hell, Blackmores etc? Where do they get off selling us expensive placebos like "Cranberry Forte" tablets if their only functions are (1) to remind us every time we take a tablet that bladder infections can happen to ladies, and thus remind us to be careful and drink lots of water or whatever and (2) to irritate our bladders to make us feel like we must need the tablets? That seriously is messed up.

As a side note, though, I suddenly realised what was going on with the slang of "to pop the cherry" which has always seemed super weird to me. I mean, first up, you pretty much can't "pop" an actual cherry. You can sort of squish it, or crush it, but "pop" is hardly the word. Also, it always annoyed me that it was "cherry" in the first place. I mean, on the one hand, you have the description of a hymen as a thin, incomplete membrane (which actually can be popped, unlike a cherry) and on the other hand you have a small firm spherical fruit which bears no resistance to the putative "cherry". I mean, honestly: what. So, long story short, what with one cervix and another, today I finally realised that the cervix totally looks and feels (no word on "sounds" or miscellaneous senses) a cherry. And I bet popping a hymen feels (and maybe sounds?), like a "pop", so apart from the fact that anyone popping a cervix during sex is doing something terribly wrong (but quite impressive-sounding), that's sort of intellectually satisfying. You know, in an "ohhhh... I get it now" sort of way. Same as when I realised that since old books sometimes call a week a "sennight" (or "se'ennight" or "sevennight" for not-short), and a fortnight is two weeks, then that was probably because it's short for "fourteen nights". I mean, it took an embarrassingly long time, but I got there in the end!

Sorry for all this lady-parts talk today. I was going to write a warning, but since it's hardly what you'd call sexualised talk, I figure it made about as much sense as warning that a post would contain a lot of discussion of spleens. I sort of figure that saying "these perfectly normal body parts might be too much for your delicate minds, look out!" is equivalent to saying "genitals, especially female ones, are objectively gross, that's a valid fact, and not at all a weird socialised thing!" and, you know, there's enough of that already. Besides, "cervix" is definitely the most sternly functional and non-sexual part of that whole area, and that's all I've really talked about, so it's hardly like it ought to be NSFW.

Hopefully. I mean, if you get fired, I'm totally sorry. (But in my defence, I did put "Cervices" right up there in the title. Plus, who wants a job working for someone afraid of a cervix?)