Random Pains

My va-jay-jay has not been feeling all that well today. Which, in turn, has my pelvic muscles feeling all “clenchy”. Lately, I’ve been feeling some random pains down there that come and go unexpectedly. It’s nothing like the pain that my fellow bloggers who suffer from vulvodynia have described, but it’s enough to make me wonder if everything is OK down there. Well, obviously everything is not OK, but I’m wondering if there’s something else going on besides the involuntary contraction of my PC muscles. I also wonder if I have always felt these random pains without really knowing it, and I’m only just now noticing because of the recent increase in awareness of my vagina? Who knows. All day today I’ve just been feeling an uncomfortable, almost burning sensation in and around the vestibule. Sometimes I feel a strange sensation on the inside. Not quite enough to really bother me, but just enough for me to think, “wait a minute, that doesn’t feel right.” It’s hard to describe. In fact, the feeling is so subtle that I almost wonder if it’s just that my mind is so freaked out, that my body is somehow manifesting that physically. Mind over body? Or it could be that I’m so just goddamn irritated from all the nasty bloody discharge that has been trickling out for nearly two weeks now! Damn Seasonique! You screw up a few days of pills, and you bleed for weeks and weeks.

Besides that pain, in the past few weeks on a couple of occasions, I also experienced some really irritating itching that turned into a burning sensation after some scratching (Haha, yes, I realize I may be sharing too much, but this is my way of keeping a record of these things so that I can remember to tell my therapist and pain specialist about it). That only happened a few times in one week, and hasn’t happened again since. Then, on a few other occasions, at random times during the day, I felt almost like a small pocket of air shooting its way up my vagina, which was really unexpected, and at one point definitely made me go “ow.” Not fun. Sometimes I’ve noticed that shifting the way I was sitting either caused or relieved the pain. Umm, could this just be a simple case of vaginal flatulence?!

But the most random pain of all has got to be this next one. It only happened once, but it was a truly WTF moment for my pelvis. I was walking in the office, when all of a sudden, I felt something like a sharp pressure right on the base of my pubic bone. It wasn’t anywhere near excruciating, but it was enough to make me walk with a sort of limp for a few minutes. Weird, I know. Any ideas?

The ramblings of an anxious mind

I am a ball of anxiety today. I can’t exactly pinpoint the cause, but I’ve been having to take deep breaths all day to calm my pounding heart and this nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. It feels like there’s all kinds of slimy things wriggling around in there. I don’t know if it’s due to the stress of car shopping, or the fact that I have my first appointment with the NP at the Pelvic and Sexual Health Institute on Friday. It might be a combination of the two.

I am absolutely petrified and nauseated at the thought of this visit. Thankfully, my wonderful sister is taking the train down from north Jersey to go with me. That calms down my nervousness a great deal. But no matter the amount of support I’m getting in this, nothing can make me feel better about having to put my feet in stirrups again and being poked and prodded in my most sensitive area. All those horrible memories of my gyno’s office come rushing back every time I think about it. Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten what the pain feels like, but then envisioning the horror that was my last attempted pap, makes me feel the pain almost as clearly as if I was feeling it at this moment. Just the thought makes me feel lightheaded and nauseous and almost brings tears to my eyes. I know that this NP isn’t going to be anything like my gyno. She’s seen women like me many, many times, and she knows what she’s doing. But no amount of reassurance can stop me from feeling so scared.

I definitely need to see a psychotherapist. Or some kind of doctor that’s going to help me make sense of this fear, to help me find the cause for it, and to help me make it go away. This weekend I was reading through some of the bios of the women in my support group, and I remember reading one where the woman said she went to go see a hypnotherapist who helped her discover repressed memories of incest from an abusive older brother. This really scares me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m harboring repressed memories of some kind of abuse when I was little. I can’t imagine anyone in my life who would have hurt me. I can’t even fathom the idea of having memories so horrible that I wouldn’t remember them. But this woman had no idea she had these memories either, so it is possible. I can’t think of any other reason for why I’m so messed up. I don’t think it was the way I was raised either, since my sister and I grew up in the same environment, as did all of my cousins, and they are all perfectly normal, sexual beings. In fact, they talk about their sexual experiences so much, it makes me want to crawl into a hole. I’m one of the oldest ones in my family, therefore I should be the most experienced. But they all see me as “the virgin.” Don’t talk about sex around L, cause she’s innocent. Some of my cousins say they admire me for still being “pure”. But I know that secretly, they all think I’m weird and that I’m probably a lesbian. I can’t help but feel embarrassed whenever the subject of sex comes up. I know these are all irrational thoughts, but I can’t help but think them once in a while. Like I said, I need to see a psychotherapist.

Moving on.

I wrote some things in my personal journal this weekend that I think are relevant to my blog, so I want to post them on here (with some edits):

“I think I’ve been focusing too much on how this “disability” is negatively affecting my attitude on life. How everything eventually comes down to me having vaginismus. How I’m even more scared than ever before to get close to a guy because I’m afraid he’s only going to want sex. And yet I also seem to want a relationship even more than I did before because I feel so very much alone in this. It feels like all of the women in my vag group have a husband, or boyfriend, or fiance that’s helping them get through it. And I have no one. Not even close. And I keep thinking that if I had such a hard time with relationships before I knew I had this, it’s going to be damn near impossible to find one now. But like someone in my group said to me, I can’t let my vag consume my life. And I think that’s exactly what I’m doing. If there’s even the slightest chance that I’ll meet someone new soon, I can’t go into it thinking that my vaginismus is going to ruin it. I shouldn’t really go into it with any expectations. But most of all, I shouldn’t want to overcome this so that I can be “ready” for when I do meet a guy. I should want to overcome this for myself. So that I can feel normal. Feel like a real woman.”

Step One

Yesterday, I FINALLY got the courage to pick up the phone and call the therapist that my gyno referred me to. I was supposed to go sometime in the middle of December, but I was way too scared to even make the call. For a long time, I felt too depressed after finding out that I was a defective woman, that I wanted to forget I had this and go on with my life as usual. I’m really glad I joined the support group though, otherwise I would be a miserable wreck everyday and would avoid my problem forever.

My appointment is for Tuesday. I didn’t realize how soon that was and wanted to call her back and yell “never mind, that’s too soon!!” But it’s better to just get it over with, right? I have no idea what to expect though. From the conversation I had with the secretary, the place I’m going to seems like a general physical therapy place. Which means they may or may not be familiar with my condition. My gyno referred me to a specific therapist, so I’m assuming she has to know what she’s going to be dealing with. The secretary said that the first visit would be a general evaluation, so it would take one hour, and subsequent visits would probably be around 20 minutes or so. So I asked her if she can give me an idea of what the evaluation entails, and she says to me, “Well which general body part are we going to be working with here? Leg, arm, back?” 

“Uhh, noo, it’s my vagina.” *small chuckle*. I can already tell here that I’m gonna have to start getting really comfortable with saying the word “vagina” out loud. And I’m sure numerous other uncomfortable words as well. Sigh.

Anyway, she told me they would likely talk to me for a while and ask me some questions, and then they would probably examine me. At which point my breath caught in my throat. I will NOT have someone poking and prodding down there without proper preparation. And I am NOT properly prepared. I’m assuming that after the Q&A, the therapist is going to realize just how severe of a case I am, and she’ll be slightly more sensitive to the fact that I am not ready to have someone jam a finger, or anything else for that matter, up a tiny opening that does not want to be penetrated. Cause let me tell you, it fucking hurts like someone is stabbing me in the vagina. And I’m pretty sure that my last visit to the gyno made my vaginismus even worse, because now I’m even more terrified than before of spreading my legs open for a doctor. 

So, I guess we’ll see how step one of “Conquer the Vag” goes.

Nightmare

I had my first and only pap smear last November. After years of avoiding the gyno’s office, I had finally heeded my friends’ advice and decided to go in for the routine pap smear. I believed my friends’ reassurances that all I would feel is a little pressure, and that once it was over, I would finally get over my fear of tampons and sex. Unfortunately, I felt more than a little pressure. I felt an unbelievable amount of pain. My doctor didn’t think much of it, and after handing me some samples of birth control, she ran out the door telling me that I better start using tampons if I wanted my first time to be pain-free. A year later, after many painful and tearful attempts at sex, I am still a virgin, and I’m even more scared to try tampons than I was before.

I went back to the gyno’s office yesterday, in time for my yearly visit. I told myself to be brave, and that the pain was all in my head, and that all I had to do was relax. As much as I tried to relax, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the pain was real, and it hurt like a motherfucking bitch. i burst into tears on the examining table and begged the doctor to stop. They finally realized that there was something wrong and that this pain I was feeling is not normal. The head gyno was called in, and I sobbed on the table while they discussed and tried to examine me. Finally, I was told that I have a condition called vestibulitis and I also have severe pelvic floor dysfunction. I’d never even heard of that. Finally, a physical explanation for why I’ve felt like a freak all these years, although that didn’t make me feel better at all. The doctor prescribed a drug called amitriptyline, an antidepressant that she said would help loosen the muscles around my vagina. After a month of taking that, I’m supposed to go see a physical therapist she recommended.

This whole thing feels like a nightmare. The more stuff I find about it on the internet, the more scared I feel. This is constantly on my mind and I’m having trouble focusing at work and on everyday things. I can’t even sit down to watch my favorite TV shows without my mind wandering or without me bursting into tears. I have never been more scared in my life.