Coping With Vaginismus

“The first time I tried to have sex, I thought, “oh, it might hurt a little—not that it’d be impossible”, says Audrey, a 23-year-old Chicago woman. “You know how you brace yourself for when a dentist is coming at you? It felt like I was bracing myself for something I wasn’t allowing to happen.”

Though Audrey didn’t know it at the time, she was suffering from a condition called vaginismus. Its name gives little hint to what actually was happening to Audrey—the muscles around the vagina contract, making it painful, if not impossible, for penetration to occur. While it doesn’t mean that other forms of sex aren’t fun, vaginal intercourse is definitely off the table until the problem gets resolved. As Audrey put it, “Your instincts have the power to push the brakes, whether you want to or not.”

Healing the Body Begins With Words

Four years ago, I leaned over the bathtub to pick up my then one-year-old son and something in my lower back snapped. It happened so fast: one second I’m bent right- angled at the waist, arms around my wet, slippery, tank of a kid, and the next second—flat on the floor. I couldn’t move.

Even the idea of moving was an impossibility. I lay there for nearly forty-five minutes—never in my life have I been as helpless—until finally, I worked myself into an awkward push-up position and slowly, slowly, military-crawled to the phone in the next room. I remember the pain made me see white, a blizzard on the backs of my eyelids.

Over the years, I’ve told this story to chiropractors, to physical therapists, to yoga instructors. “Do you have injuries I should be aware of?” they ask, and again and again and again, I begin: “I was leaning over the bathtub to pick up my son and something in my lower back…” For every time I’ve told it, every time I’ve relived it as part of understanding my own body, there is one part I always leave out:

I dropped him.

My beautiful, perfect, tank of a little boy.

I dropped him.

What Remains After Battling Breast Cancer

The crescent beside my eye (running in the living room, six years-old), the pale, asymmetrical patch above my lip (Chicken pox at eight), the toothy line across my right knee (couch jumping at twelve), the long, deep crevice on my left thigh (botched surgery at fifteen)—I’ve always liked my scars, those stories on skin.

And yet, there are two I’ve failed to disclose: the puffy red line just beneath my clavicle where a port was installed to deliver chemotherapy, and the jagged dent across my left breast where my nipple used to be—cancer at thirty-four.