Dr.'s That Suck

During this time, I went to my gynecologist (we’ll call him Dr. Clueless) and told him what I was experiencing. He had no idea what was wrong and mostly had the attitude of “you need to toughen up” or “it’s all in your head”. He would try to give me my yearly exam and I would bawl throughout the whole thing.  It was very traumatic.

Finally, at one of my appointments, Dr. Clueless was out of the room and a physician’s assistant was in the room with me. She told me that I should come make an appointment with another Dr. she had been working with – who specializes in pelvic pain. (I have never been more pissed off at a Dr. when I realized that Dr. Clueless is colleagues and works in the same office as this man who specializes in pelvic pain and he never thought to refer me to him when he didn’t know what the hell was going on with me. It would have saved me a year of pain and wondering what the crap was wrong with me if he’d been a decent person and referred me.)

When It All Started

It’s hard for me to pinpoint when exactly my vulvar vestibulitis began. I had been sexually active for a while with no problems . I was always able to insert tampons without a problem. About 3 months after I was married I started to experience consistent pain when having sex. It worsened over time. After another 3 months or so, intercourse was out of the question.

Resources

Here are some great resources that I found incredibly helpful.

 
This website has a forum and one of the subjects is vestibulectomy there are comments from many women who have tried all different kinds of treatment or who have had vestibulectomy’s. This is the forum that I found the most information on. 

Although it was helpful to me, it was sometimes difficult to sift through to find what I need and the rules of the site make it very difficult to email anyone else and ask a question. The great thing about this is that there are a lot of different women with different experiences in one place. I think you have a decent shot of finding someone who has similar symptoms that you experience and possibly finding out what they’ve tried. However, the difficult thing about this is that there are a lot of different women with different experiences in one place – it’s easy to hear someone’s bad experience with a certain treatment and freak yourself out. Just remember, no two people are exactly alike, your circumstances may not be the same as theirs. All you can do is educate yourself and choose what you feel good about.

Hereis another link to a blog created by someone who has also had a vestibulectomy. I found her blog through the hisandherhealth.com forum just a few days ago and seeing it is what made me decide to create this blog.

Here is a PDF of the vestibulectomy surgical procedure I found when I was researching it - although I hated looking at it, i felt better knowing exactly what to expect than to have a crappy drawing that my Dr. gave me.  I'm thinking maybe he gives out the drawing instead because it is less upsetting to the patient - I can definitely see why!

If I run across other resources or information that I think might be helpful, I will add them later on.

Why This Blog Exists

I'm starting this blow to put my experience with Vulvar Vestibultis out there for other people. One of the things that was really frustrating for me when I was diagnosed was finding information or support from others who have experienced it. I think because of the nature of the problem, people fee weird talking about it. People are private about their sex lives, they aren't likely to run around saying "Guess what?! I haven't had sex in 2 years because it hurts too much." That's understandable, but I think it's a shame that there are probably other people out there suffering from the same thing who feel alone and afraid. Even though this is just one person's experience, I hope that even one person can find this blog who needs it.