By Georgia Grellier
Welcome back to Story Time with Georgia, where I relay weird stories from members of the Colorado College community and sometimes just me. If you want to be Catalyst-column famous, find my email by stalking me on the internet and send me one. At this point, it’s become almost entirely period-themed but I’m not unwilling to stray from the brand.
Who: Anonymous senior
When: September 2018
What:
As far as things with long strings go, tampons are pretty tough ones to lose. And yet, as I reflect on the premenstrual era of my own life, the fear of losing one inside my body and having it float around in there for the rest of my life weighed heavily on me.
Although I later learned that’s not biologically feasible, and the strings are pretty long anyway, there is one CC senior who did actually manage to push the limits of the human body and lose (not even misplace!) a couple regular-sized tampons up in there. It should also be said that these were applicator-less tampons, which are essentially the same as the regular ones but squished into a very small plastic wrapper and thus appear very small. That’s environmentalism, baby!
This is what happened: this student woke up in the morning with their period, and put in a tampon. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for the fact that it was their first time using an applicator-less one. Said student went about their day as usual, not thinking anything about the tampon they had very routinely placed inside their vagina earlier. Eventually, they went to the library, and sensing that it had been a few hours, they sauntered over to the third-floor bathroom to switch it out.
At this point, things began to go not so smoothly. Although they were reaching for the strings to take the tampon out, none of them seemed to be within reach. Anonymous student described, “I had to reach into my cervix and look for it.” After a few minutes of searching, it didn’t materialize, so the student made the logical decision to put in another tampon — because when you can’t find the first one, sometimes it’s just better to pretend it never happened.
Another couple of hours passed, so the student went back to the bathroom to resume the great tampon search of 2018. Again, not a single tampon materialized, no matter how long they searched. This senior then proceeded to put in a third tampon; I take this as a sign of some kind of mental breakdown.
With three tampons hanging out inside their body, the student knew it was time to head over to Boettcher instead of continually increasing their risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome.
“Fortunately, the health center actually has flashlights for this kind of thing,” they said. After a slightly uncomfortable 15 minutes, not a single tampon was found yet again.
The student moved on with their life and decided to forget about the whole thing until a recent discussion about period mishaps, but they seem to have disappeared into some kind of void for now. Please keep this story as far as possible from premenstrual, puberty-experiencing kids; it will not go over well.
Takeaway:
If you can’t find a tampon inside your body, don’t just keep putting more in. It’s insane that I have to say that.