Dan Honsfeld has officially received his Doctor of Medicine this spring without ever fully grasping the concept of womanly bleeding as part of the menstrual cycle. “I understand the rise and fall of estrogen and progesterone, how the uterine lining is built in conjunction with egg maturation and ovulation, but I just don’t get the whole blood part,” says Dan, visibly confused and uncomfortable regarding the subject.
“Is it like popping a water balloon with a large gush of blood and then a drip for a few days? Or is it more of a constant stream? Or spurts?” he wondered to himself, much too embarrassed to ask for clarification and instead just avoiding the subject entirely with patients, faculty, friends, and his dakimakura.
Dan, who scored in the top 5% nationally on his Step 1 and graduated AOA, considers himself fortunate that women’s health was so disregarded in the medical curriculum – otherwise he would have been “boned for sure.” Still, he does wish that maybe he had as much knowledge about menstrual bleeding as he did about things like intraoperative vessel control or tourniquet indications for extremity hemorrhage, as (per Dr Honsfeld) all three are possibly associated with life-threatening exsanguination. Nevertheless, the young doctor thinks he has the gist of basic period management and could figure the rest out on the fly, or at least gather the equipment for someone else to do so.
“And do you wear a pad all the time, and then stick a tampon up there when you see bleeding?” the medical doctor mused. “I know wings on pads are important, for comfort and mobility – they say that on the commercials – but how much absorption do we really need here?”
As of press time, Dr Honsfeld was trying to figure out if girls poop every time they use the bathroom, I mean, since they are already sitting down, or if sometimes they just pee or what’s the deal with that.
