Fun with Femenine Hygeine

The idea for the following post was borrowed from Mist1, but to keep it confusing, it was posted as a guest blog on Sarcastic Fringehead.

As a male any adventures I have had with tampons have been strictly one sided. I don't have any insight into their operation or how they are applied, but a combination of my career choice and strange sense of humor have given me ample opportunity to come in contact with these magical wonders.

Since I was young I had a joke that involved elephants and tampons. I was telling this joke long before I really even knew what a tampon was. What do elephants use for tampons? Sheep. Why do Elephants have trunks? Sheep don't have strings. A brilliant joke that fuses the taboo topic of the menstrual cycle with animal cruelty.

While about to comment on Mist1's guest post I recalled several stories involving tampons in my life. I am going to force them upon you.

One year two of my friends and I went to New Orleans for Lollapalooza. The parking for Lollapalooza is about a mile from the actual entrance to the concert. People would set out for the trek, but once they reached the gates with their backpacks and were informed they could not bring them inside, no one wanted to trudge all the way back to their vehicles. Most people, like us, just piled them up outside the gate. A few decided to hide them in the bushes. As we left the concert (inebriated on booze and an unnamed illegal substance) we walked back to our vehicle while having an Easter egg hunt for backpacks. I think we found five in all. Most had useless crap, a random T shirt, some CD's, a book on Hare Krishna, but there was also a box of tampons. We kept drinking that night and finally back in our hotel room over Bourbon St, we would take the tampons, Soak them in Orange soda and fling them out the window on to random pedestrians. Those strings make them extremely easy to throw. I learned that night that tampons get really big when wet, and explode in an amazing manner when they hit.

When I was about 19 and in Community College, my friends and I would drive around (sober, we were not into booze at this point) and dare each other to do stupid shit. One such dare involved a female friend of mine going into a convenience store and frantically trying to convince the guy behind the counter to sell her one individual tampon. She spent about thirty minutes begging and pleading, trying to explain the urgency, but he would not relent. Finally she just grabbed a large handful of napkins, asked for a rubber band and walked out. I always wanted to hear that guys version of what happened.

In the hospital we have a miniaturized version of the tampon called a nasal tampon. It is used to pack patients nose after nasal surgery or if they have a bad nosebleed. The first time I saw one it made me laugh because it looks exactly like a regular tampon, but about 1/4 the size. I stole a handful and tried to convince my friends that they were tampons for midgets.

And finally, to show that I could not talk about this topic without being gross:

When working in the Trauma ICU, one of my fellow nurses kept complaining about h0w bad her patient smelled. It was a fairly young lady, from a car wreck, who was heavily sedated. The nurse, a middle aged Fillipina, broke out all the cleaning supplies and went to work to better the odor coming from the patient. She said she scrubbed her thoroughly from head to toe. When she was cleaning the nether regions she noticed a brownish string between the patients legs. The Fillipina nurse was not sure what it went to and was concerned it might be something medically important, so she got some bleach and water and cleaned the string, turning a sparkling white. The Fillipina nurse would repeat this process for the next three nights she was assigned to the patient, but the smell never improved. Finally she decided to ask another nurse for a second opinion. The new nurse took one look and said, "She has a tampon in." They removed the offending item and disposed of it. Apparently Asian countries do not use tampons. The smell greatly improved, the lady would go on to make a full recovery (none the wiser about the tampon incident) and the Filipina nurse, to this day, checks the vagina of every patient she takes care of for strings.