“Max, any fantasies?”, Paula reminded him that he had been silent for too long. “Anything relating to your braces, maybe?”. Paula smiled teasingly. Max blushed. He would need to recover from this somehow. “Maybe, I should visit Lauren’s medical practice at some point”, he said. “Touché, Max”, Paula laughed.

Now Lauren started to feel uneasy. Had her own medical fetish just taken center stage? Was she comfortable with that? Would people ask questions?

As a young girl, she did not like to be sick. Going to the doctor was very embarrassing to her. When she was sick, she felt ashamed that her body did not work as it should, that she was imperfect. Oftentimes, she had to be forced by her parents to undergo necessary exams and treatments. She had hated her rectal temperatures as a little girl. She would have always made a fuss, and her parents were oftentimes forced to hold her in place to get a proper reading.

When she was 10, she narrowly avoided wearing an orthopaedic brace for a suspected scoliosis. Lauren feared that she would need to wear one of these at school, and had been horrified for many many weeks before she was told that physical therapy was sufficient in her case.

At 14, she got her own orthodontic braces. She had been hugely embarrassed about her crooked teeth, but even more so that everybody could see that she needed to wear these orthodontic braces on in order to get her teeth straightened. To make matters worse, she had been diagnosed with an overbite and prescribed a cervical headgear.

This was a metal bow that went around her head and was held in place by a strap around her neck. She had to wear it for 16 hours per day. She would never wear it without being reminded by her parents but was able to persuade them that she did not have to wear her headgear at school or otherwise in public. She would have died from embarrassment. It was hard enough to have to wear it in front of her parents and her sister.

That way, however, she never fully made the 16 hours wear time per day, and remained in treatment (including her headgear) until her first year in college. She had stayed at her parent's house for that first year because she did not want to be seen wearing her headgear in her dorm. The embarrassment of still living at home, however, seemed less severe to her than having to show her headgear.

Ever since her first examination she was in a state of horror when she had to go see her gynecologist. She hated the ultimate exposure of having to undress and sit on the gynecological chair. “Chair, what a euphemism”, for a piece of furniture that fully exposed her female parts in such a humiliating way!

In college, she had joined her university’s cycling team but never expected that this meant having to undergo a full physical exam at the beginning of each semester. This included a stress test on a stationary bicycle during which she would be undressed but for a sports bra and short panties, strapped to an ecg, blood pressure cuff and a nurse would use his cold stethoscope to listed to her heart on her sweaty breast whenever he seemed fit during the test.

She hated being strapped to all these sensors, sweating in front of everyone and, worst of it, being auscultated in her state of sweating by a nurse who was about her age. But the worst part really was when a new doctor suggest she should wear a rectal probe during the test in oder to monitor her core body temperature—in front of everyone. She almost died of shame while the probe was inserted, and her test results were so bad that day that she was demoted to the second team for the new semester. She had cried on her way back to her dorm room.

Ever since then she had avoided going to doctors appointments. She tried to avoid the a shame, embarrassment and humiliation she associated with them.

Strangely enough, however, she had developed a certain excitement when she heard about someone else being examined or having a doctors appointment. The idea that this other person had to subject her- or himself to the same exams that she found so shameful and embarrassing, somehow resonated with her. It took a while until she realised that her feelings were more than 'schadenfreude', that sexual arousal was involved on her part.

Did other people’s embarrassment turn her on? Had she just admitted in front of her classmates at her own party that she had a serious medical fetish?