"That must be a really old issue. Was it about Clinton?"
"No, Nixon." I'd been paying attention in History class, too. I almost said 'Andrew Johnson', but I didn't think Mom was up on post-Civil War politics.
We both laughed at my joke anyway, and it seemed to relieve some of the stress that I had been building up.
"The reading material in doctor's waiting rooms is notorious for being out of date," Mom said. "I remember seeing a copy of Popular Science that predicted that before the turn of the century, cars would fly, and there would be a computer terminal in every house."
"Flying cars? What a terrible idea. And what's a computer terminal? Is that like a PDA?"
"No, it's just the printer and the keyboard. The computer was somewhere else and it was as big as a house."
"That makes no sense."
"A lot of the things people used to believe we would have by now made no sense. Progress is what you can make tomorrow with that you have today. People who try to predict the future always assume that nothing will change except the few things they want."
"Like the flying cars? Was there really a time when that sounded like a good idea to anyone?"
"I don't know. I'm not that old. But since you can hardly drive two blocks without seeing an accident, it would seem insane to think that these same idiots who can't manage to avoid each other on the ground would be any safer in the air."
A nurse stuck her head out of a doorway and called, "Samantha Kramer." I was so startled; I almost jumped out of my chair. Talking with Mom had distracted me for a few minutes, but all my nervousness came back in an instant as I scrambled to my feet.
"This way, please."
The nurse seemed professional and friendly, not at all like Helga, the She-Wolf of the SS, whom I suppose I expected. She introduced herself to me as Cathy and she led me to the scale and wrote down my weight and height. Somewhere I had managed to gain a couple of pounds. I was still 5'1", but the scale said 107. I wondered if I needed to lose that, or if it was new muscle-mass.
We trooped through a maze of little rooms where I had my temperature and blood-pressure checked, then some blood drawn by a nice girl in a blue-checked smock. After being given a questionnaire to fill out, we were led to a small examining room to wait for the doctor, who would be along "in just a moment" according to the nurse.
The moment turned into several. Long after we had finished the questionnaire, which was all 'no, I've never had bubonic plague' and 'yes, I have all my own original parts', we had time to talk some more.
"Are you still nervous, honey?"
"Yes. Some. This is a nice place, though. Everyone is friendly and they all seem to know their jobs. The girl who drew blood hardly hurt at all when she stuck me."
"Yes, that's been my experience, too. Dr. Bonner always has good staff. His nurse, Cathy, has been with him as long as I've coming here. That's one way you know a doctor is good, he hires good people and he keeps them."
"That makes sense. The doctor Yvette took me to always seemed to have a new nurse each time I went. They always seemed like former prison guards to me."
"Oh, no! That's very bad, Sam. Next, you'll tell me his name was Mengele."
"No, it was Acula. Who's Mengele?"
"Never mind. You'll learn about him soon enough. But let's talk about something else. What did you learn in school today?"
"I learned that I'm not as good an actress as I thought I was."
"Uh, oh. That sounds ominous."
"It was embarrassing. I got found out while I was working out in the weight room with Steve and the guys."
"I was going to ask how that little experiment was going. What happened?"
"I almost ripped the power-lift machine out and tore the wall down."
"My goodness! What did the boys say about that?"
"Steve made them promise to keep shut about it and I don't think there's going to be any trouble there. Steve was really sweet about the whole thing. But I found out something important — I know how I can control the power now. It's all adrenalin. Well, mostly adrenalin. The ripping cars open part is the adrenalin, the Dragon face, the other skin stuff and the physical changes are mostly trance things. The rest is just me. I'm beginning to understand where this is coming from. It's not just one thing, like I thought. It's lots of things that all come together."
"So, how do you control it?"
"Basically, I just have to keep my cool. As long I don't get hyped-up with adrenalin, the rest of it is something I have to start voluntarily. But it was the Power that scared me. The feeling that I was out of control, you know? Now I know how to keep it leashed."
"And how to unleash it?"
"Yep. If I get mad, or if I get pumped-up deliberately, I can do things — awesome things — without hardly any effort at all. It's just this incredible primal strength that takes over and I lose the ability to judge how much force I'm using. It just jumps right off the scale when it's unleashed — as you say."
"Dragon Power."
"Exactly. Very deep, very primal, very untamed. 'Dragon Power', I like that."
There was a scratching noise at the door, presumably someone pulling my chart from the holder, and the exam room door swung open.
Dr. Frank Bonner wasn't at all what I expected. I guess I really didn't know what to expect — either a kindly, grey-haired man with sparkling eyes and a ready smile, or a gruff, brusque man with a perpetually sour expression who nevertheless inspired confidence in you.
In reality, he was a short, wiry, balding fellow with a white fringe of hair that draped over his ears into a pony-tail that hung down his back. I'd never seen a doctor wear a pony tail, especially one who had so little hair to put into it. As he peered through his bifocals at my new chart I saw that his face was creased from years of exposure to the sun. His eyebrows were white as well, and were so scraggly that they looked like a couple of hairy caterpillars crawling across his face. He wore the traditional white lab-coat, but he wore it over a tie-dyed t-shirt and a pair of jeans. He had on a pair of scruffy canvas deck-shoes and no socks. He was about as unimpressive a sight as I had ever expected to see behind a stethoscope and I liked him the instant I saw him.
He looked up from the chart and then looked back and forth from me to Mom and back.
"Hi, Sam," he said cheerfully as he sat down on a rolling stool. "I'm Doctor Bonner. I hope we haven't kept you waiting too long. And please excuse my staring, but Mrs. Reynolds told me that she was your guardian, and that you two were not related. Seeing the both of you together made me question that. You two are as alike as any mother and daughter I've seen."
Mom and I looked at each other. This wasn't the first time someone had mistaken us for being related, but it was the first time that someone in his position had made that mistake. I tried to correct him without insulting his professional judgment.
"I'm very flattered that you think so, Doctor Bonner, but really, the similarity in appearance between Mrs. Reynolds and me is purely coincidental."
Dr. Bonner didn't look convinced, but I thought he might let it pass. He didn't.
"Completely coincidental? Are you sure there hasn't been any non-genetic contribution?"
"Non-genetic? I'm not sure... oh!" I looked a question at Mom. She shrugged.
"I'm sorry," she said to me. "I should have told you that I discussed my plan to give you the serum with Frank. I did tell you that he had been my doctor for a long time. He knows about my treatment, and that I was planning to use it on someone else."
"And after seeing you, Miss Kramer, I deduced that I was looking at the other beneficiary of that remarkable elixir. Truly remarkable stuff. I with there had been some way to preserve the formula. Ah, well. May I examine the results?"
I nodded. This wasn't the exam I expected, but it was a reasonable request, since Dr. Bonner was obviously the best person to confirm that everything was all right.
"Then please disrobe completely and sit up on the end of the examining table here. You may have a drape if you'd like."
I stood up and started unbuttoning my blouse.
"No, thanks. I've overcome any problems I might have had with nudity. Especially since the treatment, I feel quite comfortable in just my skin."
I hung up my blouse on a hanger and unzipped my skirt and stepped out of it. Mom hung it up while I climbed onto the table and sat down carefully on the paper sheet. Dr. Bonner gave me a thorough going-over above the waist, with special attention to the piercings in my nipples, which he examined suspiciously before conceding that they had healed perfectly.
He then checked for lumps and any other abnormalities. His touch was firm, but gentle. He had a lot of ground to cover and he did it methodically. He spent such a long time at it, that By the time be finished I might have suspected him of being a dirty old man, except that his poking and squeezing was far too clinical to be anything but professional.
"Well," he said, making some notes in my chart, "you will be glad to hear that everything appears completely normal. The enlargement seems to have been perfectly symmetrical and your supportive and glandular tissue has firmed up to a remarkable degree. The added weight hasn't caused you any problems?"
"No. It hasn't."
"Good. No problems with balance or posture?"
"None... well a little at first, but I got used to them pretty quickly. There are some things I have to do differently. Tying my shoes was a problem at first. I use mirrors more than I used to. That sort of thing."
"Indeed. I see that you don't wear a bra."
"No. I'm quite comfortable without one. There is no sag at all, you see?" I pulled my shoulders back and put my hands under my breasts to emphasize the lack of any sag or droop.
"I see. Yes..." He sounded like he wanted to pay me a compliment, but he felt it would have been inappropriate. He might have been an old-school Gynecologist, but he was still a man and he still reacted like one. He stared a couple of seconds longer than medically necessary and then he cleared his throat and resumed questioning me.
"Have you experienced any pain lately?"
I'm sure he meant pain related to my breast enhancement, but coming so soon after my 'afternoon on the rack' as Neeka had put it, and my new game with Polly, it struck me as funny. I managed to contain the laughter and only smiled while I answered.
"No, no pain to speak of."
His bushy eyebrows jumped a bit as he took in my expression and my plain answer. I'm sure he saw right through me. He thought a bit before he continued.
"Good. Like I always say, 'no pain, no pain'." He smiled a little at his own joke. "Well, let's continue with the examination, shall we?" He reached out and pulled a knob on the side of the examining table. The end behind me swung up into a slanted backrest and locked into place.
"Just lean back and lift your feet, please." When I did, he flipped down the front of the table and a pair of metal stirrups rose up. "Now just put your feet in the stirrups and try to relax."
While I got settled in the stirrups with my knees high and spread and my butt almost hanging off the edge of the table, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and rolled an instrument tray over to the table. Right on cue, his nurse came in to chaperone during the pelvic exam. She stood next to my shoulder and patted my arm reassuringly.
Dr. Bonner took one look at my pussy and his eyebrows nearly jumped off his forehead.
"Sonnuvvagun! A clitoridotomy! A total one, too! You almost never see that. Most surgeons only do partials. A lot of women have trouble getting used to the additional stimulation of having their clitoris exposed all the time. This is remarkable. I can certainly see why you might want it done. Your clitoris is significantly larger than normal. Did you get advice from someone to have your hood removed for that reason?"
"No. No one advised me to do it," I told him. I was having a hard time thinking of ways to skirt the truth. I wanted to confide in him, but I felt at a disadvantage in my vulnerable position. He was perfectly comfortable peering up at me from between my legs, but I was uneasy about revealing secrets to a strange man with his face in my pussy. When I considered my own description of the situation, it began to seem almost comical that I was having trouble opening up to a man to whom I was already perfectly wide-open.
"So, you must have decided to have the clitoridotomy at the same time as you had the rings put in," he went on. "The healing on both looks about the same to me. Whether under medical advice or not, it was probably the correct course of action. Otherwise, you would have a problem with cleanliness and possibly with adhesions due to the hood's constriction on your clitoris. I'm just surprised that you opted for a complete removal rather than the more common partial procedure. Not many women are quite that adventurous."
I was speechless. My doctor — and I guess I had just started to think of him as 'my doctor' — had just confirmed that the sexual mutilation I thought I had endured at the hands of a lunatic was a medically justified and even necessary procedure. 'Flabbergasted' just about describes how I felt.
He squeezed out some clear lubricant onto the tips of his gloved fingers and before I could think of a response to his last comment, he slid two fingers into me and started feeling around. In a reflex response to the sudden intrusion, my opening clamped down, followed by the rest of my vaginal muscles.
"Sorry," he said, working his ringers around in me. "I thought it would be easier for you if I did that without giving you a chance to tighten up. Just relax while I check around under the hood."
He had only gone in to the second knuckle when those eyebrows shot up again.
"My, my!" he said, smiling. "Here is something you don't find between a girl's legs very often."
I assumed that he wouldn't be so happy about it if he had found something abnormal. I thought he was making a joke to put me more at ease.
"What?" I asked, playing along.
"Balls!" he said.
I clapped my hands over my face in embarrassment. I was so nervous about the exam and I had gotten so used to carrying the pair of metal balls around in me that I had forgotten to take them out.
"It's all right," he said. "Nothing to be ashamed about. But we need to have them out if I'm going to do a thorough examination. Come on, let me have them."
He took his fingers out and held his hand under me, waiting. It took me a couple of tries to get over being embarrassed and get my muscles working again, but after a bit of concentration on my part, I managed to push them out and the heavy steel balls plopped into his hand.
"Here, Cathy," he said to his nurse, who was ready with a small basin. "Run these through the autoclave, please."
Nurse Cathy stepped out of the room on her errand.
I thought that was nice of him, to sterilize them before he gave them back. I was still mortified that I hadn't remembered to take them out myself. It was careless and inconsiderate of me.
"Those are some heavy ones. You must have remarkable control to be able to carry them around. And for it to become so routine that you forgot them shows a great amount of strength and dexterity."
"Thanks. I practice rolling them around and keeping them separate, so they don't click together. I think it improves the muscle tone and helps me stay tight."
"Well, you are certainly tight. If Mrs. Reynolds hadn't told me you had an active sex life and but for the absence of a hymen, I might have thought you were a virgin." He continued the exam without the balls in the way and kept up the conversation at the same time. He had very good hands and he knew just how much he could pull and push without making me uncomfortable. I started to feel more at ease now that he was the only stranger in the room. Maybe it was just that I had started to enjoy the exam. Certainly the lubrication he had applied was becoming quickly superfluous as my own juices started to flow. I was able to relax more and that helped me be more candid with him. Even when he forced a finger into my anus, I stayed relaxed. Mostly relaxed, anyway. Having someone grip you like a bowling ball and feel around inside you is an interesting experience. I was undecided if it was a pleasant or unpleasant one, but pleasant seemed to be winning out. I hadn't been a big fan of anal play, but I could see how it might be fun — under the right circumstances.