WHEN a woman suspects that an errant tampon has migrated so far up her vaginal canal that she can no longer find it, she tends to panic. She paces. She sweats. She swears. She calls her friends. And, these days, she might even post about it on social media. Thus was the sad and humiliating fate of one Ushaanaa Laela Shah, a residential home-care worker on England’s Isle of Wight, who was suddenly stricken with the all-consuming terror that accompanies the realization that a tampon has gone rogue. As the crisis was unspooling, Shah posted on Facebook that she'd begged her friend Lydia to come and serve as the Jaws of Life to pluck the pesky plug from ’tween her trembling legs: “I couldn’t find the end of the string and at first I started laughing until I started freaking out…. I got into the bath hoping that might help and contemplated whether this could be the end.
I my friend and she even came over to try and help me but when my mum came home, she suggested I [go] to [the E.R.]. I even felt like I had a tummy ache.” Shah let the world know, even though nobody had asked, that Lydia “walked in on me lying in the bath, hands crossed over my chest, listening to a playlist of ‘songs to die to.’” She added that Lydia, who is clearly a very good friend, put plastic bags on her hands and fished inside Shah’s vag, searching for the tampon like a desperate sailor rooting around in a slop bucket on a clam quest. When Lydia’s spelunking yielded no feminine hygiene product, Shah was rushed to a local hospital and continued to fret and sweat and twist and turn for three hours before a doctor examined her and declared that there was no tampon inside her. So what happened to it? There are only two possibilities: 1) She had never put one in when she awoke that morning; or 2) the Russians are involved