Listen to your body. Please. You know it best; you know when something isn’t right, and you know when something isn’t working. Stick to your instincts and fight for the right doctor, the right treatment and fight to be heard (or if that fails, get your scary mum to take over like I did)
Hi, its me again! I just wanted to say hi to the new readers as I finally took the next baby step and have shared this blog on a bigger platform, rather than just a small circle of my close friends. This is a huge step for me! I also wanted to document the fact that as of this week, my little blog has somehow reached a sufferer in Dubai. Can you believe it? A random person all the way in Dubai, reading and learning about MY vagina. If you asked me a few years ago what makes me feel most proud, it certainly wouldn’t have been this, but there we go.
Now that you’ve heard about the emotional support that helped me throughout my journey, I know you’re dying to hear about the endless treatments, consultations, scans, smears, swabs and arguments that led me to receive a final, correct diagnosis. Just a little disclaimer, you may get the opinion that I didn’t think too highly of the doctors that treated me and some of that is true. I completely understand that doctors need to be thorough and test you for everything, and of course I’m grateful for that. However when you’re being prescribed treatments for infections you don’t have, are being pushed from doctor to doctor who wastes time repeating tests you’ve already explained you’ve had numerous times, and when are out of ideas, look at you and tell you that you’re making it up, you have every right to be angry. It’s now August 2019 and I’ve just received my first smear test, hoping that this would give me some answers. As I was 20 years old at this time, I had not had a smear test before and oh my god, I never wanted another one again. (Little did I know I’d get at least three of the suckers) Before this scare’s anyone, yes a smear test is not supposed to be comfortable, it is not supposed to be smooth and relaxing, but it also shouldn’t cause you to feel the worst pain in the world. The reason as to why the pain was unbearable for me, was because of how inflamed and sore I was. I had been this way for over a year so you can imagine the state of what I looked like down there. (Sexy right?) So please don’t be scared off and ladies GO GET YOUR SMEARS.
Whilst I awaited these results, I carried on as normal and went back to university to start my final year. Remember before how I mentioned that I was a dance graduate? Well, imagine being active all day, dancing and exercising 24/7, when all you can feel and think about is the fact that your vagina is quite literally on fire. Gosh, did I struggle. Thank god I felt so passionately about dancing that I was able to push through the days and still enjoy what I was doing. I absolutely loved dancing throughout university, I loved dancing with my class and my friends, I loved rehearsals, I loved creating something to be proud of, but the pain did unfortunately become worse and my dancing did take a hit. So how do you pick yourself up everyday and continue to work hard to achieve your goals? Well, for me the answer is simple, and a few readers of this blog may not realise the effect they had on me, until now. Being able to go to class with some of the most, kindest, hilarious, and hardworking girls I have ever met, pushed me to want to succeed, regardless of everything else going on. Of course, within a performance based subject, there was some drama and a hell of a lot of competition, but to this day, that same drama and competitiveness is one of the main reasons as to how I pushed myself in class, danced my socks off and reached my goals. So, thank you, thank you, thank you, to my Lincoln family.
My final, huge thank you goes out to my two best friends that I had the pleasure to meet at the university of Lincoln. It’s one hundred percent true, when they say that university friends are friends for life. After eight or more hours of dancing in pain every day, sometimes the idea of rushing home, crawling into bed, and having a good cry, seemed like the best idea. I could not have been more wrong. Instead, the best idea was, coming home to endless glasses of wine, good food, games, songs, laughter and just being in the presence of the smartest, hardworking, kind-hearted girls, that are my best friends. Who has time to sit and cry when you have so many mistakes to laugh and gossip over, so many bottles of wine to pop open and so many tv shows to binge until 3am in the morning? But when needed, these two girls held me up, fought away my fears, reminded me of who I was and helped me succeed.
If there’s one thing you learn about me from these posts, I really hope it’s that I don’t give up easily, I’m not a quitter and that I am extremely strong and motivated. Despite what I was struggling with, the pain, my mental health, my relationship with myself, I gave the final year of my degree everything I possibly had and came out the other side with a grade to be proud of. Now I know for a fact that I can achieve absolutely everything that I set my mind to, and that is powerful. No chronic pain condition was going to stop me.
A few weeks later, my results came back and again, they could see nothing wrong. The next step was to be sent to a specialist who tests for rare and uncommon STD’s. Now many of you that know me, will know I’m not a huge fan of confrontation or arguing, unless I feel strongly about it. After hearing this, I informed my doctor that again, they were wrong with their next step and that they were just wasting time and that I couldn’t take another week of the way my mind and body was making me feel. I cried, I told them I knew best, I just wanted to feel some relief. Of course, I did not win and I’m pretty sure they were also out of ideas so off to the health centre I went. You’re probably wondering how I was so certain I hadn’t got an STD so let me tell you. I was 20 and had only ever been with one person. This person had only ever been with me. The doctor treating me asked if I had any concerns I was being cheated on or if I had been cheating, to which I laughed, a lot. If you know me and you know my boyfriend, you’ll know why that’s laughable. Still, I humoured them and went along with the countless STD checks. Throughout this entire journey from my first symptoms to my final diagnosis, looking back, the most embarrassing part for me was this. Having to explain my sex life to a not one, but three different doctors, in such detail, still makes me cringe to this day. So if you can sit in a room with a complete stranger and tell them, how often you have sex, exactly how you have sex, what happens before, during and after, then I promise you, you can speak up and seek help if you are struggling with an ‘’embarrassing’’ illness.
I’m going to leave this post here and call it a night (suspenseful right, will she have an STD, wont she?) So, you’ll have to come back next week to find out the burning question. (See what I did there? Burning? Okay it’s definitely time to end the post here)
P.S. Thank you for all the support and the feedback I have received. Its overwhelming and my heart is extremely full.
Tiff x
