When is a vagina not a vagina? When it’s A Trophy! 🏆

Vaginal atrophy, geddit? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be (ha ha. Okay. I’ll try to stop vag punning now, soz.)

Photo by Wren Meinberg on Unsplash

Autistic people feel things deeply to our very core, to our bones. We can sometimes hear the rush of our own blood coursing through our veins. Feel our heartbeat thumping in our throats. Hear ourselves chewing our food and think we are deafening everyone around us for miles and miles and miles. Hear other people chewing their food and feel intense pain and revulsion.

We all experience pain uniquely. All external sensations may also be felt with extreme sensitivity experienced as pain, vibrating irritations, the lightest touch can produce an extreme reaction. We can have a limb practically severed off, and not register the pain which would have a non-autistic howling. Whether this is a matter of dissociation and/or masking can is debatable. Attributing our differences to possessing “super powers” denies us the respect we deserve as humans, just like everyone else.

In my experience, I can tolerate extreme pain without conveying it at all. But we autistics can find things that are irritating and uncomfortable, such as a scratchy sock or a tag that feels like sandpaper against our skin, and that can completely overwhelm us and trigger a meltdown.

When we tell non-autistics about our perceptions of the world we are all forced to coexist within, they laugh at us. They tell us we are wrong and weird and stupid and over sensitive. By the time we reach adulthood, we those labels form our identity. (Which is why I feel it is better to have the label of “autism”, than feel like a social reject with no idea why.) This is how autistics learn it is not safe to tell others how we really feel under any circumstances, or else we open ourselves up to gaslighting and humiliation.

But we can tell our doctors about pain, right? They will believe us, they will maintain confidentiality, ensure we can feel validated and reassured and believe us, right? Right?! Wrong. Over our lifespans we will see numerous doctors who will range on the spectrum of “validating” to downright “ridiculing”. We learn to be guarded with everyone. We can feel medical issues developing within us years before they manifest into objective results on tests. Autistics are often excellent researchers, and we find out enough information for ourselves, although it can feed the tendency towards being seen as hypochondriacs. It can really test our executive functioning skills to have to book and attend appointments, and follow up consistently on medical advice and treatment plans.

I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we don’t relish is going to see our doctor, lying on the bed, showing them our torn, itchy, burning, weeping vag, only to be told it’s thrush and needs air/anti-fungal cream/go commando/just relax etc. Then returning after the treatment hasn’t worked still to have vaginal atrophy go unacknowledged.

Had I known what vaginal atrophy really is, I would have saved myself months or years of pain. Why does nobody talk about this stuff? I am breaking the silence here. Atrophy means “to weaken”, and my assumption that an atrophied vagina would be in some state of prolapse. Baggy. Collapsed. Painful. Defected.

I was talking to a friend who has just started taking hormone replacement theory and she hadn’t heard of Ovestin cream. Oh. My. God. Vaginal oestrogen cream is just the most incredible treatment. When we compared sore vulva stories, it turns out she had the same complaint I had before I started HRT.

We both decided that for us, vaginal atrophy felt like thrush (burning, sore, raw, itchy) that would not resolve itself when using medicated thrush cream.

“Why does nobody talk about this?!” she asked me. And I immediately wanted to shout from the rooftops: “VAGINAL ATROPHY IS THINNING, INFLAMED, IRRITATED SKIN OF THE VAGINAL WALLS” but I had my kids with me and they already think I am embarrassing enough. So I subsequently forgot all about it and then decided a week later (slow processing much?) that I could just let you all know about it here, and you can tell all your friends, they will tell all their other friends and soon all our midlife vaginas will be happy again.

Vaginal atrophy is caused by a lack of/decrease in oestrogen. It is hilarious that medical websites describe it as a “genitourinary symptom of menopause” and also say that when the vulval and vaginal skin is raw and thinning, sex is painful. Erm - what poor woman is having to endure sex with a common yet unresolved skin condition that nobody wants to think about, never mind talk about?

Even urinating can be absolute agony. And wiping after using the toilet. Torturous. Going to the toilet always reopened the skin tear I had. My perimenopausal stress and urgency urine incontinence meant it was always stinging. Bearing in mind my autistic acute sense of smell, the fragrance from all these effects plus the constant menstrual bleeding I had ensured I was never feeling clean nor dry enough to heal.

Going commando was out of the question - and fresh air alone has not cured my perimenopause yet, so I had no reason to believe that simply airing my vulva was the cure all I needed. And my family all ask me why I don’t want to ride a bike any more? Ouch 😫

I was watching Taskmaster tonight and a contestant joked “write about what you know” and I know about thinning vag skin and now, so do you! Yay! Don’t do what our mothers and grandmothers all did and dust it with talcum powder, flatly refuse to discuss intimate topics and “just get on with it”. Get yourself some vaginal oestrogen cream from your doctor and rub yourself happy!