Please take off your clothes

I recently had my first experience at a gynocologist here in Germany and can safely say I was terrified. Mostly because of the chair. Let me explain.
I am not averse to going to the doctor. I'm fine with the dentist and I've never had any problems giving blood or getting needles. Like a good breeding machine, I'm sorry, I mean woman of childbearing age, I go and get a pap smear every year or two years or whatever it's supposed to be. And I'm cool with that.
But in Germany they don't just get you to lie down on a bench, no they don't. They have a special gynocological chair. Now it may well be that I'm showing my ignorance here, having only ever been to my GP for the procedure, and perhaps gyno chairs are way old news in surgeries across the nation. For me, they are a new, and rather scary thing. The fact of the matter is, rather than lying back comfortably and staring at the ceiling while the doctor does their thing, I was quite perturbed at the prospect of having to sit up, with my legs strapped in and hanging in the air in a ridiculously undignified fashion and chatting to the doctor between them. I imagined it being like a Monty Python sketch where the woman's legs are encased in fishnets and heels and lots of very unfunny puns are made about carpets and so on.
It didn't help that when I mentioned this small but growing anxiety to a friend, her reply was something like Oh yes they're horrible and do you know they're always in pornos? Well, now I did, and I had another set of reasons not to want to sit in one. Although I must say I've always thought there was something kinky about the way everyone here is harbouring a hyperchondriac just waiting to come out. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but if you say you're not feeling well, you're foot hurts, you've cut yourself or your throat tickles to anyone here they're pretty likely to say that something's going around and you should take a day off. Stiff upper lips are for those Poms with a crappy health system across the water, here you don't need a doctor's certificate unless you take more than three days off. Imagine all the things you could do in a gynocological chair in three days...?
Anyway the point is I was nervous, so nervous I left the ring I was wearing in the bathroom and still haven't gone back to pick it up. When the nurse came to get me I immediately though she was the doctor and took umbridge at her wanting to measure my blood pressure straight away without asking me why I was there. I had visions of waking up and being told that I'd lost one of my ovaries. When she told me that the ultrasound was free this time only I almost jumped down her throat: why do I need an ultrasound? I think she thought I was crazy. I think she was right. However, I still maintain it's a bit weird to offer eveyone an ultrsound just for the hell of it like a complimentary pen.
Once I finally got into the doctor's surgery everything was fine. The chair turned out to be quite cool, it tipped back so it wasn't nearly as uncomfortable as I'd imagined and the leg rests were absent of straps. I was so relaxed I even said what the hell and got the unneccesary ultrasound, which led to my seeing my womb for the first time ever. It was so exciting and looked just like all the pictures in books, except cooler, because it was mine.