The rain totally made me want to stay in bed forever and ever yesterday morning. But then I remembered that it was diaphragm fitting day! I squirmed my way through two long classes in cramped auditoriums, both taught by a professor who repeatedly mispronounced the word “pharynx.” You’d think if you used this word professionally all the time, you’d know that it’s not “far-nicks” but rather “fair-inks.” Maybe I’m just being a jerk.
Anyway. When it was announced a little while ago that the women’s health students could attend the peer diaphragm fitting session, I was pretty stoked. I’ve written before about how the midwifery students get to practice everything on each other, but that the women’s health students aren’t given that option. So, you know, it was exciting, even if we weren’t going to be palpating any ovaries. We’d had a very brief instructional lecture about fitting diaphragms last week, so we were all a little surprised when we got to the session yesterday and were told to just go ahead and get started. Ummm…
I got into a group with three other girls. All four of us are in women’s health, which means that this was our first experience with the whole peer pelvic thing. We had our set of five different diaphragms and two handouts about how to fit them, and that was it. One girl decided to be the first guinea pig, and I volunteered to do the first fitting. The technique for fitting is that you reach into the vagina, all the way back to the posterior fornix behind the cervix, then lift your fingers a little to see where the pubic bone hits your hand. You make a mental note of where that is, or use your thumb as a marker, and then compare your fingers to the different sizes of diaphragms. It’s not the most exact science, but I think it’s pretty cool to use your hand as a ruler.
We got comfortable with each other very quickly. Through the course of the one hour session, we each got up on the table, and we each had everyone else’s fingers in our business, and there was a lot of laughing. There was also a lot of, “Hm…I think this is the right size…why don’t you feel? What do you think?” We were all pretty impressed by how far the instructor could bend her ring and pinky fingers back so that they stay out of the way when she’s giving a pelvic exam. We determined that we all need to do more finger yoga.
