Something was terribly wrong.
I sat in the waiting area of a Rhinelander emergency room, a yellow band around my wrist marking my place in line. A long line. As the hours continued to drag on, my excuse to my family of “going to get gas” became flimsier and flimsier. Although they believed it last time. Should I be offended about how little they pay attention to where I am?
A nurse stepped out from the back room, and I looked up hopefully. “Mr. Wilson?” Damn. Beside me, an old man who had spent the last 20 minutes attempting to unlock his phone looked up with his mouth open. “We’re ready for you.” His wife grabbed him by the arm and helped him rise unsteadily from his chair, leaving tiny flecks of drool to mark his passage down the aisle.
I fidgeted restlessly with my own phone and did my best to ignore the text messages as they came through.
“Hey! How’s it going? Any updates?? Did they give you your dick pills yet?”
They sure did. A lovely cocktail of Doxycycline and these indelible little over-the-counter nuggets that numb your urethra and turn your piss into orange Gatorade.
When I had left the first clinic two days ago, everything had gone exactly as the nurse said it would. I did, in fact, “piss in this”, as she so eloquently put it, before depositing my cup onto a tray outside the bathroom. I then had a brief examination with a physician’s assistant who proceeded to prescribe me the antibiotics and the magic piss-dye. And finally, after a few days of staining my boxers with dribbles of orange urine, I got the expected call from the clinic’s office:
“Hello? Is this Thomas Krug?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Hello, Thomas. This is Betsy calling from the Aspirus Clinic of Rhinelander. How are you this morning?
I feel like a sick Oompa Loompa. “I’m doing alright, yourself?”
“I’m doin’ just great, thanks for asking. I’m calling to give you your test results from your visit with us on the 24th. Is now a good time?”
I perked up in excitement. Finally, time for the official verdict. Add one more name to the mailing list, sir, because yours truly just joined the STD club. “Yup, now is great,” I said, lowering my voice to a smooth rumble. Given your test results, she already knows that you fucking lay pipe. Might as well sound the part.
“Excellent, so I’m seeing here that you were screened for chlamydia and gonorrhea, and it appears that both results came back negative. Great news!”
Huh?
She paused, likely waiting for me to respond with words of relief and gratitude. Instead, a long moment of silence hung between us before I found my voice. It was no longer smooth with delusions of male bravado. Instead, it broke slightly as I said, “Uh, so. Now what?”
“Well, your test results are negative, sir.”
“Yes, I get that. But again. Now what? I still have all the same symptoms I came in with.”
“Sir, if you’re still having trouble with your symptoms and need to see a medical professional, we highly recommend calling your primary care physician.”
“He’s two hundred miles away in Milwaukee!”
“Then we’d recommend that you go to urgent care.”
“Weren’t you urgent care?”
The line was silent for a moment.
“A different urgent care.”
I gave a curt “Thanks” and hung up the phone in frustration. My shoulders slumped and my gait lost its swagger. I ask for so little in life, you’d think the universe could have done me the small favor of granting me at least one venereal disease.
With a resigned sigh, I picked my phone back up and gave my physician’s office a call. And so, the war drags on.
“Dr. Mendoza’s office, this is Lauren speaking.”
“Hey, this is Tom Krug. I’m in Rhinelander, Wisconsin and went in for an STD test a few days ago? They gave me some antibiotics, but their office just gave me a call and told me that my test results were negative. But I still have all my symptoms. So, then they told me to call you. So… What should I do?”
“Hmmm well, Dr. Mendoza is pretty booked, but it looks like he can see you…August 17th. At noon. Does that work?”
Three weeks? Three more weeks of crying on bathroom tiles? I’ll have to go to work like this. How’s a man supposed to face his employees with a withered dick? “Is there no way he can see me sooner? This has been going on for days, and it’s not getting any better. I can’t wait until August to get this taken care of.”
“Tom, can you hold for a moment, please?” The seconds passed slowly as I waited, listening to the sterile melody of the on-hold music.
“Tom, are you still there? Great. I talked to Dr. Mendoza, and based on what you’re describing, he says that you should keep taking the Doxycycline. He also suggested that you go to urgent care as soon as possible.”
Mother Fu-
“I’ve already been to urgent care. They’re the ones who sent me to you!”
The line was silent for a moment.
“A different urgent care.”
A different urgent care. Well, I had found one. Unfortunately, it was at the hospital, a small, rural hospital whose urgent care doubled as an emergency room. It was the place you went when your ATV accident escalated from “potential loss of limb” to “potential loss of life”, which meant a long wait for folks with their blood still inside their body. I was currently at hour four.
The price for my wristband had been another cup of urine, which I provided shortly after checking in. Since then, all I could do was sit and wait, watching with growing impatience as the double doors to the hospital swung open time and time again to admit children with broken bones and old men with chest pain. It’s not my fault there’s nothing to do around these parts except climb trees and eat Arby’s. Grandpa shouldn’t get to cut in line just because he’s ninety and can’t put down the curly fries.
“Hellloooo TOM what’s the update? You can’t just leave me hanging here! I’m too invested!”
I turned my phone on silent and put it back into my pocket. I can and I will. Sorry, friend.
“Mr. Krug?” I perked my head up. “You can come back now.”
Finally.
The nurse was a young man with pink scrubs and a bald head. As I followed him back to an empty exam room, he flipped through my chart and gave a low whistle. “Whew, sorry man. Been there.”
A fellow comrade in arms? It felt comforting to be in the presence of a veteran. Is it too invasive to ask him where he served?
Not a minute after he sat me down on the examination table, a knock came from outside the door, followed by the arrival of two newcomers. The first was a thick, beefy man with thinning brown hair and an unkempt beard. Had he not been wearing blue scrubs and a white coat, I would have assumed he was a truckdriver who had mistaken the hospital for a rest stop. The second was a pretty young woman with long, dark hair and a matching pair of blue scrubs. She wore a nervous smile and walked with a light, tentative step. A pen in one hand tapped out an anxious beat against the notebook she held tightly in the other.
The nurse took this as his cue to exit. He cast one more sympathetic look over his shoulder before stepping into the hallway and closing the door behind him. In my mind’s eye, I could see him raising a fist in solidarity. Remember why we serve, brother.
As the new man entered the room, he snapped purple, nitrile gloves over his fat hotdog fingers, and immediately got down to business. “Mr. Krug, I’m doctor Ackerman. Now, I’ve been in urology for over twenty years, so trust me when I say I’ve seen it all a thousand times over. And I find a young guy like you coming in here with urinary problems and a negative STD test? Well, the way I see it, that only leaves one other culprit.”
He walked briskly to the supply cupboard on the far side of the room. He rummaged around for a moment before turning back to me with a bottle of lube and a serious look on his face.
“It’s your prostate.”
…What.
“This young woman with me is Kimberly. She’s a medical student observing me for the day. Before we proceed, do you have any misgivings with her being in the room while I continue my examination?”
Kimberly stood by the door, eyes staring straight down at the notebook clutched in her hands, her tapping picking up tempo as she awaited my answer. I hoped I only imagined the light smirk I saw playing across her downturned features as her pen rapped against the yellow notebook pages.
“Um, sure. That’s fine. I suppose.”
“Great. And will this be your first prostate exam, Mr. Krug?”
I blinked and clenched my ass involuntarily. No. No no no no no. Not here! Not now! A man’s first prostate exam should happen in the comfort of his own physician’s office at the age of forty-five! Not bent over a stranger’s exam table in front of a pretty medical student with an obvious voyeurism fetish.
“Well, I don’t think that thing that one girl did in college counts as an “exam” per se, but- uh, yes, doctor. First time.”
Dr. Ackerman walked over to the examination table and gave it a pat. “You can probably guess what the gloves and lubricant are for. I’m going to need you to take off your pants, including your underwear, and bend over, toes forward, with your elbows on the table. I won’t lie, it’ll be uncomfortable, but you shouldn’t feel any pain. Let me know immediately if you do.”
Moving with as little speed as I could muster, I stood up, tossed my pants and boxers onto the nearby chair, and reluctantly assumed my position on the examination table.
“Kimberly, please join me,” Dr. Ackerman said as he walked around the table. Are you sure you don’t want to sit beside my clothes on the exam-room cuck chair, Kimberly? Probably more comfortable.
She gave a nervous jump and flitted over to join the doctor in staring at my exposed asshole. “Watch carefully, Kimberly. Mr. Krug, are you ready?”
“Yes,” I managed to squeak out.
I could hear the doctor snapping open the tube of lubricant and imagined him massaging it gently between his fingers. “Alrighty, then. Here we go.”
I fuck I thought to myself sadly as I felt Dr. Ackerman’s index finger slide inside me. I fu—ahhhhh!
The Existential Wannabe 