I’ve been absent for a while.  It’s true.  I was gone for a lot of reasons- I mostly feel out of the blogging mood, but I’m back. Maybe.  we’ll see if it sticks.

I actually wanted to blog about something I haven’t talked about to many people, at least not the finer details.  Specifically about the pain during sex I spent most of the summer dealing with.  In may of this past year, I was diagnosed with run of the mill bacterial vaginosis that I tested positive for during my annual STI screenings and I ended up having to treat it three times in order to make it go away entirely.  At some point during the treatment, it became impossible to have penetrative sex without pain, and it didn’t go away.  It was both a deep stabbing kind of pain and pain around the entrance of my vagina, the levatar muscles, I think.  For this, I was at my OB/GYN’s office 12ish times this summer.  We got real close.  We did two infection panels, a wildly unpleasant pelvic and trans vaginal ultrasound, and several manual exams.  After the ultrasound, my dr decided on the fly to perform a manual exam just to check things out.  At this point she discovered a low grade bladder infection that was responsible for the deep pain.  Two visits later and a few wildly inappropriate comments from the nurse practitioner, I’m diagnosed with what could be Vulvular Vestibulitis, but due to the nature of research around vaginal disorders, there wasn’t a definitive test( Of which I maintain that if I had been a man with a penis that hurt every time I tried to have sex, I’d’ve had answers in a lot less time than 12 visits.)  It really just meant I had generalized pain.  It isn’t very well researched and lots of treatments are hit or miss and I was told explicitly that whatever we tried it might not go away so I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  We tried a treatment, and the first one worked and it’s only been about a month, but it’s still working.

I felt so irrationally worthless while I couldn’t have sex and nothing prepared me for that. I was wholly prepared for the things to try to treat it, how to do the treatments and the probable side effects- but no one told me how it would fuck with my head.  No one.  I felt broken.   I know now, and I knew then, that I am more than my ability to have “normal” sex.  But nothing prepares you for emotional side that comes with such a condition.   I vividly remember breaking down on the couch with my then partner one night(I should say that my partner in all of this was freaking amazing.)  And this break down was the first time I’d verbalized to him how this was all making me feel.  Looking back, I probably should’ve verbalized my feelings a lot sooner, but hey hindsight is 20/20.