I've had this rash around my sports bra area for a while now, and I thought it was just from sweating (my family, we're sweaters.), but it hasn't gone away, just kind of gotten worse/expanded. Nothing painful or itchy, just kind of there making my boobs and back look a little like I didn't know how to put on sunscreen. I decided to see a dermatologist about this, largely as I had mentioned, offhand, this rash to my mother, who proceeded to give me her "just-get-it-taken-care-of-while-it's-covered"-face, and she would randomly ask me about this rash in two month intervals.
The dermatologist, a strictly medicine-like woman (think: the woman version of my foot surgeon...okay, maybe not as coarse, but still, my first thought isn't "care bear"), quickly diagnoses me and asks me repeatedly if I would like a full-body exam. ("You're already in a gown, it's no trouble to examine you." I'm in a gown because you have to look at my breasts to see this rash. I don't need you to look for moles and other discolorings that I know I don't have. But I guess it's purely protocol. I politely declined, at least twice.)
There is a nurse (female) in the room taking the doctor's notes (I guess everywhere isn't totally electronic yet, which was kind of refreshing, if I ignored the fact that now two complete strangers had the opportunity to glance at half of my ladyparts), and the doctor then asks me something about if she can bring in her PA and use some black-type light to look at the color of my rash. Apparently some rashes turn one color if they're fungal and some turn a different color if they're bacterial, etc. It sounded quite cool, so who am I to turn down science?
The PA comes in (a female) and they quickly have me lie down, shut off the lights, open my gown (thank goodness I'm still wearing my shorts, I thought I only had to get this undressed for the gynecologist?), and turn the blacklight on. (Aren't I supposed to be drunk dancing to music at this point?) The doctor makes some comment, like "You're a student; you understand this, right?" It was all very clinical - they weren't looking at my boobs as boobs, they were looking at them as a body part with a rash on it - it was more the rash they wanted to see, because it is abnormal and needing to be fixed, which I can respect. But three strangers jumping to look at and examine my open chest - shouldn't they have bought me dinner, first?
In hindsight, I don't think I was as "traumatized" as I thought I would be, probably because they did look at me so clinically. There were no comments made about the size of my chest (or the lack thereof) nor about the severity of my rash (it's not bad), etc. So hoorah for science. Maybe I'm also getting to a point where, because of my science background, breasts are breasts, you slice them off of a cadaver and we all look the same (I know this to be true because we did it this summer; under the direct supervision of a professor, I might add).
But this does lead me to wonder, especially with the advances in technology, is there such a thing as privacy anymore? There are all of these new apps and programs to track everything you do, eat, see, breathe, and buy. Does privacy mean anything anymore? That's a little drastic (heck, I just shared a potentially personal story to the internet, voluntarily...hey, I thought it was a little comical), but I hope you get the jist of my question.
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