Free Aches & Pains by Maeve Binchy Page B

great sympathy, a fairly light heart and a genuine belief that nothing is quite as bad as it seems at four o’clock in the morning.
MAEVE BINCHY

BARING YOUR BODY
     
    Did anyone ever say that going for a medical examination is somehow in the same league as entering a beauty competition?
    Yet nurses say they are driven mad by time-wasting false modesty, and insanely apologetic attitudes about what is, after all, just a human body. Although sympathetic and aware of how low some people’s self-esteem can be, particularly at a time of ill health, medical staff say they often wish there was some kind of basic training course for patients, something to convince them that this is not an exhibition or a peep show. It’s an attempt to find out what is wrong with them and cure it.
    They report patients who clutch onto hospital gowns when asked to remove them, as if the staff were just about to play the music and ask them to do the Full Monty for the X-ray department. Many women tense up at the thought that people may be studying their stretch marks or odd stomach flaps and reporting their deeply unsatisfactory findings all over the city.
    But when a man is asked to take off his shirt so that someone with a stethoscope can listen to his lungs, that’s what they are actually doing, listening to his lungs. They are not measuring him up as an understudy for Schwarzenegger, or checking out his swelling biceps and manly shoulders, and finding him wanting.

     
    When a woman removes her clothes to place her breast into the contraption that will deliver a mammogram she is not being auditioned for a
Playboy
centrefold, she is wisely getting herself tested for pre-cancerous cells.
    A man who suspects he may have a prostate or hernia problem cannot be examined for either while in his city clothes. A woman can hardly have a smear test while wearing the baggy leggings of her pink track suit.
    Yes, the medical examination does seem just one further indignity, inviting humiliation and vulnerability, at the very time when it’s least tolerable. None of us would choose to have to show to complete strangers the parts of ourselves that most other human eyes don’t reach. But they have seen all those bits of people before. In fact they are seeing such bits all day long.
    When we realise that self-consciousness is self-obsessiveness, it’s much easier to take off our clothes as quickly as possible and get whatever it is done.
    I speak from the point of view of someone not at all satisfied with a body image, but lucky enough to know it’s of no interest to anyone on earth except myself. I was helped by a happy childhood where we were all told we looked great and believed it, and by good friends along the way who were never part of any style police.
    But I think I was also greatly helped by going to a nudist colony by accident. I was going as a journalist to write about it, and I turned up on the bus withmy clothes on, intending to leave them on. But the bus went, and either I took my clothes off or I sat on the side of the road for eight hours until another bus came back to find me. It was in Yugoslavia and it was very hot. I took my clothes off.
    I went into the camp and hid behind a bush. Then I crept out a bit and sat sort of covering myself with my handbag on my lap and my arms across my chest, smoking in a frenzy.
    And then slowly I noticed people with the most horrific shapes and dangling bits and extraordinary appendages going by, and nobody was paying a blind bit of notice. So I got the courage to slink along the wall towards the restaurant.
    I joined the regular campers, and we sat in cafés all day with bits of us falling into the soup, and our bottoms roasting on hot seats. Occasionally we fell into the sea without having to put on or take off swimming costumes. And eventually my eyes stopped looking at the white bits of people and I just got on with the day like everyone else.
    It was about the most liberating thing I ever did. I would