Do I think I'm better than you for this? Honestly; a little, yes.
Pride cometh before the fall.
I fall a lot.
This is one such story.
Last week I went to the sauna. They were having a special. Sauna entrance plus a sitz bath for 45$. I don't know what a sitz bath is, but it sounds like a soaking. I read the description, it says something about heat up to the navel. It also says it's good for...sore ovaries, sore testicles, and hemorrhoids (what the hell is the etymology of that word, it took 5 minutes to spell it properly). But on the list of benefits, the first thing mentioned was "muscular problems". Well, I had just been told by a doctorly type person that I needed to soak my leg. So, under the pretenses that this was a soaking situation up to the navel, I signed up even though I have no immediate problems with my testicles...
I go to the locker room and relax in the pool, do the dry cake sauna. I go sit in some of the other crystal chambers, and then head on to my "bath".
...
Two women take me upstairs to a room marked, "Sitz Bath #1". We enter into a small space where I see a leather chair. They ask me to take my pants off. Then they pull out this cloak...really, it was a shower curtain. Like a cross between a shower curtain and a barbers cape. So I pull that on up to my neck. When I first saw it, I thought, Sweet! Water bag! Because I've had this invention in my head for a while. I always want to nap in the bathtub, but it's not terribly comfortable and the water gets cold. My idea is to have a self-heating water type bag, that you put your whole body in and then you can take naps as though you were in the tub! You can imagine my dismay when I put this thing on and it was open at the bottom.
The chair.
You know those old "toilets". When we decided we needed to sit to toilet, rather than squat? So it was just a chair, with a hole, over a pot/bowl.
I submit these to jog your memory. I really like the second one:
But in my situation, the chair was much the shape of the first one, but covered in leather, with a leather lid. And the "pot" was attached to the underside of the chair. And was full of infrared bulbs.
No water.
No soaking.
Only baking.
One woman turns it on and asks me to wave my hand over it to see if it's too hot. Still unsure what was going on, I say it's fine.
Both ladies step up to help me with my...shower cloak. Lifting to make sure my bits can get full exposure to the oven.
I sit down and they hand me a magazine...well they tried. I asked them how I would read with my hands under the shower cloak.
As they're leaving, I sense my buns starting to burn and asked them just as they were leaving to turn the heat down.
And then I sat there for 30 minutes. I mean, damn, I paid for it, and a new experience is a new story, and a new reason for me to talk, and I can never have enough of that.
Afterwards one lady came back to help me dress...I was still too stunned to protest. And then back to the nude bathing area. I felt...dirty somehow. Like everyone was looking at me and thinking, "Look at her, she has sore testicles". I got over it.
I've now looked up what a sitz bath is. It seems it is meant to be a soaking, but only your bits.
So if your bits are abotherin' ya, get out yer washtub and set fer a piece.
