What I’m trying to say is, my new family doctor has huge hands.

Huge.

Oh, wait, my notes are out of order.

Let’s rewind a little.

So, my father died from prostate cancer.

*checks notes*

I’m pretty sure this post is supposed to be at least a little bit funny, but that’s not a promising start, is it? Still, persevere we must. So: my father had prostate cancer, and my uncle had it, too. Father, dead. Uncle alive. Difference is, of course, that one got checked out, the other didn’t, and I don’t think it’d be a huge spoiler warning to tell you which was which, but I’m happy to leave that puzzle up to you. My father did not have insurance because, drum roll please, he had preexisting conditions (high blood pressure), which upon retirement from his job of many eons meant he would’ve exhausted his savings just to pay for insurance. So, he skipped it for a few years in the hope that he’d reach Medicare without any grave conditions.

Grave being something of a pun, there, I guess.

Jeez, I swear this gets funny.

Point is, he died, and with him and my uncle both having had that particular brand of cancer, I am considered in the high-risk category for the disease. As such, I have to get checked every few years, which means, y’know, not to put too fine a point on it —

Finger in butt.

That’s just how that goes. Assfinger. *uncorking sound* That, plus a blood test, is how a doctor figures out if you have cancer all up in there. I’ll get this out of the way so you don’t think I’m misleading you: I do not have prostate cancer, to my or my doctor’s knowledge.

I do, however, want to tell you about this test.

Because my new family doctor — like, I just saw him for the first time last week — has enormous hands. I didn’t think to look before all this, erm, occurred. My previous doctor in the same office was a woman and did not happen to have huge hands. In retrospect, actually, her hands seem like delicate flowers — like little dandelion stems, thin and wonderfully flexible. But new doc? Hands that could pop a volleyball. Tree-trunk fingers with lug-nut knuckles.

Here’s how the test goes:

Get up. Drop trou. Drop boxers. Unlock the chastity padlock that guards the treacherous expanse between the Balls-to-Butt Bridge, thus revealing the entrance to the Mines of Rectalia.

Then, hunch forward. On elbows.

At this point, the doctor hunkers down back there and starts… you know, having a look. He figured that, whilst back there, he’d check everything out, given that folks rarely get a very pronounced or described look at their own buttholes. When you think about it, that particular little magical asterisk is completely far and away from our own eyes — it’s the Perth, Australia to the New York City of our eyeballs. It’s way the fuck down under. And compressed, too, by scads of flesh. So, Doc thought he’d check the whole landscape out back there, make sure nothing had gone direly wrong.

“Your anus looks great!” he said, and I add that exclamation point because this new doctor has a way to make everything sound like a triumph, like my excellent anus was a victory for mankind.

Hey, a little lipstick goes a long way, Doc.

He also said that my anal muscles have “good snap,” which I assume means they are like the rubber bands you find around bundles of asparagus rather than, say, a piece of gum that has been chewed so long it has lost all of its cohesion. Good snap. It made me think of the sound you get when you bite into a really good hot dog? The pop of the casing? Not an ideal image during this particular intrusion, but the mind is a funny place.

At this point the doctor, bored with the appetizers, decided to go right for the main course, and thrust one of his magnificent rebar fingers deep into my nether-passage. I guess he didn’t warn me because then maybe I’d tense up? My sphincter has good snap, after all, and I’d hate to break one of his glorious examples of manly fingerdom. Anyway. He felt around like… hm. Well, let’s say you have a milkshake, and you slurp down all of its deliciousness and then, right at the end, note that the sides of the cup remain slick with milkshake leavings, so you run your finger around the inside of the entire cup, sure not to miss a drop. It was like that. All around the inside, like he was looking for a secret candelabra or hidden bookend that would reveal a previously-concealed passage. Then he said, “Your prostate is super-smooth!”

Lando Calrissian smooth, Doc. It picks up all the ladies.

I then asked him, “While you’re back there, how’s my heart doing?”

And he gave my heart muscles a little massage and said, “Fine, fine, great. Your heart has good snap. But I did find these–” And then he pulled out a set of keys to a 1998 Saturn four-door.

Okay, that last part didn’t happen.

But he did note the super-smoothness of my prostate, and then his iron girder finger fled my most forbidden canal and left me feeling surprisingly hollowed out, as if I was standing suddenly in a room that had no furniture. (Echo, echo, echo.)

Good news was, no prostate cancer. Plus: great, snappy anus.

Which, if my wife ever wises up and leaves me, will be my eHarmony headline.

Anyway, all of this leads me to:

This is really uncomfortable stuff, getting probed like that. Elbows forward, my Ent-like doctor sticking his branches up my no-no-hole. And there’s a part of you that thinks: nope, yeah, no, this is so not worth it, this is weird, I feel weird, I’m pretty sure this is weird.

It’s not weird.

It’s normal.

And, in fact, necessary.

Because what’s worse than getting reamed out down there is, oh, I dunno, goddamn fucking cancer. Cancer — even if it doesn’t kill you! — is a sonofabitch that cares little for your comfort, and though I have not yet had it, I am very well assured (ass-ured?) it is a thousand million blamjillian times worse than the tests you gotta suffer through to detect it.

I come from family who, honestly, is a little wussy about these kinda tests, be they prostate exams, colonoscopies, any manner of testicular juggling. (Wussy and, in some cases, prejudiced. As if a prostate exam would “turn them gay.” First: nothing wrong with being gay. Second: gay and “anal invasion” are non synonymous. Third: gay is not activated via some clandestine switch next to your prostate. “Sorry, Bob, flipped the wrong switch. Broke it, too. You may wanna call your wife.”) I’ve met some women (older ones, usually) who seem somehow prudish about all the vital lady tests, too — they hurt, they’re uncomfortable, they’re weird. Boob mashing and vahooha scraping. And I get that. I dig what you’re burying.

But, really, get it done.

Get this stuff checked out when you need to get stuff checked out. I experienced a little physical discomfort, but I knew the doctor wasn’t back there like, licking his lips and masturbating with his free hand. This isn’t titillating to him. He’s an expert biological plumber, not a sex addict.

(And maybe it’s time to get shut of the notion of TMI anyway. If it really is information, then for the sake of hot fuck you can’t really have enough of it. Too much information? No such thing! I reserve the right to retract this statement after one of you emails me some graphic macro image of the cairn of skin tags adorning your third nipple.)

To reiterate:

Testing.

Get it done.

Get it done.

GET IT CHECKED OUT, FOR CHRISSAKES.

Just, y’know, look at your doctor’s hands first. I’m just saying.