A Total Embarrassment

We returned to the hotel after our Windsor excursion in the late afternoon, and found ourselves with some time to kill. We had a trip to Stonehenge leaving in the dark of night (for reasons I'll get to in my next trip-related post), so we spent some of the time until then in the hotel room with the TV on. At first, it was British game shows loaded with questions about cricket, the House of Lords, and other things quite outside our field of knowledge.

Then came an unsettling show entitled "Embarassing Bodies." It was basically an hour-long procession of people with uncomfortable medical problems. And though this may well have been on some sort of restricted, HBO-esque kind of channel, I think there was also a cultural difference between England and the U.S. This program had absolutely no reservations in talking about some things that "Embarassing" doesn't quite seem to cover. And showing them too.

There was the woman whose ruptured (and subsequently removed) breast implants from the 1970s had left her with two sunken recesses on her chest. We got to see the results of several new restorative surgeries as she first had scar lines reduced, then had new breasts put in, and finally had nipples reconstructed on her new breasts.

"Why exactly are we watching this?" I think I asked, looking up from my round of phone Sudoku long enough to catch a man with hives on his genitals that he seemed far more reticent to talk about than to show us.

And then came the reason why I bother recounting this story. After all, watching TV in a hotel room wouldn't ordinarily make the highlight reel of a trip that included even half the things we did. But what came next is burned in my mind so forcefully that I'll remember it for the rest of my life just as surely as seeing Shakespeare performed in a replica of the Globe Theater.

It involved a woman who, after the birth of her child, was now experiencing some loss of control over her bladder. She would involuntarily urinate at awkward times, and was consulting a doctor about a surgery to repair the damage her body had sustained.

If you don't know me that well, you may not know that I'm unreasonably squeamish when it comes to medical matters. You can throw gallons of fake gore on a movie screen without fazing me, but I have actually gotten a touch queasy after having my blood pressure taken. If a doctor is actually drawing my blood, I have to lay down and stare intensely at the ceiling. I most certainly don't want to watch a major surgery on television.

I buried my attention even more intensely in my phone Sudoku, letting my boyfriend continue to watch this horror show he could not seem to look away from. A minute or two later, he lets out a startled groan. Reflexively, I glance up at the television for a fraction of a second...

You know at the end of Predator, when the creature takes off its hunting mask and roars, its strange mouth mandibles splayed in multiple directions? Yeah, that's what was going on with this woman's business and a half dozen sets of forceps.

You know those guys who say that being gay is a conscious choice that people decide to make? I wish I could show each and every one of those idiots a freeze frame of this picture, because if anything in the world could consciously make a man stop being attracted to women, this visual would be it.

If it were entirely up to me, good readers, I think I'd have kept this story to myself. But my boyfriend visits the blog too, and I think he'd say that my account of our London trip would be missing a vital episode if I'd omitted the night we watched "Embarrassing Bodies." Whatever your take on this chapter, he gets the credit or the blame.

Yikes.