First, you ask your patient to change into a flimsy paper garment. After making her wait an uncomfortably long time freezing her ass off, have her hop up on your exam table and spread ‘em wide.

You’ll have a blindingly bright light that you should maneuver in position to illuminate your patient’s lady parts. Once you’ve got a good view, grab your cold metal spreading device and lube it up. Be sure to have a generous supply of antiseptic-smelling medical lubricant on hand; you’ll need all of it, and possibly more. Much of it will squirt out of your patient later, but that’s her problem.

Slip the device into the vag, and then crank it open using your vag-spreader crank. You now have unrestricted access to your patient’s cervix, and are ready to proceed with the Q-Tipping.

Take an extra-long Q-Tip and insert it so as to tickle the cervix—or, actually, go ahead and just poke around in there for a while. Your patient will be extremely uncomfortable, but this is a medical necessity, so she’ll just have to deal.

Once you’ve swabbed a good sample of whatever’s going on up there, you’re ready for the smear part of the Pap smear. (The “Pap” part probably comes from the Dr. Pap who invented the test; it’s probably not short for the human papillomavirus. Probably.) Go ahead and smear those cervix cells in a Petri dish or something.

Okay, now you’re ready for step two. Lube up a couple of fingers, and feel all around in there to make sure all the parts are in place. You can put the other hand on your patient’s midsection so that you can squeeze her properly and see if there’s anything untoward happening, to the extent that you can determine. Just kind of poke around and see if everything seems okay.

Final step! Remove the vag-spreader and your lubed-up glove, and administer the breast exam. You definitely want to poke and prod around to see if there are any lumps or other signs of trouble. Depending on the size of the breasts, you may also employ a squeezing technique; whatever it takes.

Everything in order? Great! You’ve now administered your first Pap smear. See if you can do nine more within the hour.

– Jay Gabler, under the tutelage of Sarah Heuer, Becky Lang, and Katie Sisneros