Guest Post - Linda Kage 'The Check-Up' + Giveaway

Please welcome Linda Kage to Books for Company! In the emails me and Linda have exchanged I have really warmed to Linda, she is so lovely and SO organised! ;)

 I am hoping to read The Colour of Grace in the near future and I hope you will too!

Here is a great and funny guest post by Linda :

THE “CHECK-UP”

One big downfall of being female is having to suffer through those yearly physical check-ups.  You know which kind of check-ups I’m talking about, yep.  I can still remember my first exam, barely covered with a thin sheet, feet clamped in those chilly, metal stirrups…and ugh, it is just me, or are those offices always freezing cold? When I saw the specula the doctor was going to use, I was like, “You’re going to put that where?  Um.  No thanks.  I’ll pass.” 

Yeah, I didn’t get to pass on that particular experience. 

Well, there is a similar scene in my newest book, The Color of Grace.  My sixteen-year-old heroine Grace lives through her first “check-up” and it’s no picnic for her either. Quite emotional actually.  But I’ll let you discover more about that scene for yourself.

Today, I’m going to share my own most-traumatizing check-up story.  Don’t worry, it’s a funny kind of traumatizing. I can actually laugh about it now.

I was thirty years old and probably six or seven months pregnant. Huge and clumsy, I didn’t possess a graceful bone in my body. I had reached the point in my third trimester where I had to visit the doctor once every two weeks. By then, I’d learned the pattern of my appointments: Get weighed, have my blood-pressure taken, then go pee in a little cup.

Seriously, I think they find the smallest cups ever made for pregnant women to pee in.  It’s hard enough to aim when you don’t have a huge watermelon-sized lump obscuring your view.  But when your flexibility is zip and you’re going at it blind, hitting the cup is a flat-out miracle.

Relieving my bladder was not a problem, however, not with my little bundle of joy tap dancing on it and all. So at least I had plenty of liquid to work with.  After phenomenally filling the cup with enough sample to turn in, I realized there was some drippage down the outside. 

I know.  Serious eww.

Too embarrassed to turn in a cup with pee dripping down the side, I decided to wipe off the little drip.  Looking back, I should’ve turned it over how it was.

Oh, why didn’t I let that little drop go??

With my pants still pooled around my ankles and a cup of warm pee in one hand, I reached for the roll of toilet paper hanging from the wall beside me.  To this day, I’m still not totally sure what happened.  But I sorta tripped somehow and oops, out splashed my sample, soaking the entire—yes, the ENTIRE—roll of toilet paper, splashing against the wall, and spilling down to form a nice, yellow puddle on the floor.

So, yeah, the little drip trickling down the side of my cup turned into a rather big drip...and a mortifying catastrophe. 

I can’t remember my face ever burning so hot as when I had to step out of that bathroom and hunt down a nurse to confess my accident.  Sheila (which I had to name the nurse in The Color of Grace) was so incredibly cool. She just lifted her hands to calm me down, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,” as if this kind of thing happened all the time.  And she took care of my mess, God bless her!

So that’s my personal traumatic doctor’s visit story.  If you want to hear about Grace’s traumatic “check-up”, I guess you already know what to do.  Happy Reading!

Side note : Katie Couric talked about this issue in May, discussing when girls should have their first exam. If you’re interested, here’s the link.

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