As a women’s health nurse practitioner in Ithaca, N.Y., Cate Guggino has performed thousands of pelvic exams. But until recently, she said, she had never fully come to terms with her own exam at the hands of Tyndall.

She was 25 and a theater major when she went to the clinic for a checkup in the fall of 2001 or early 2002. Tyndall took her history and told her to get undressed behind a curtain in his office.

As the examination started, she said, he put his fingers inside her vagina and pressed on one specific area. She cried out, and he expressed surprise that it hurt. He did it again, and she cried out again. “I thought you said you weren’t a virgin,” he said.

Guggino told him she had had sex before, and he replied, “Well, your hymen is still intact.”

When she asked how that was possible, he shrugged off the question. Guggino said she took Tyndall at his word, but found something about him off.

Over the next two decades — through her nurse practitioner training and nearly a decade as a women’s healthcare practitioner — she never questioned Tyndall’s assessment.

“It was almost like there were two parts of the brain that weren’t talking,” she said. “There was the story he told me and there was the part that knows all this stuff about women’s health.”

When she read stories in The Times of Tyndall’s alleged misconduct, she said, “it sort of bridged the two parts of my brain.”

“Something I had chalked up to a weird quirk specific to my visit was staring back at me from the pages of a major news outlet,” she wrote in an account she sent The Times.

Looking back, she said, she believes Tyndall was touching an area called the G-spot, which when stimulated can cause sexual arousal.

“I think about how much trust [patients] put in me and how hard sometimes those exams are for them,” she said. “The idea that someone would exploit that position for their own pleasure….I don’t really have words for how despicable I find that.”