Testimonio desde Portugal
I am a Portuguese woman, I’m 27 years old and I have been dealing with vulvar pain since I was 17. It has been a long journey and ten years have felt like fifty when you experience pain daily.
It all started after initiating my sexual activity and it was provoked due to several UTIs and yeast infections that led to the use of several aggressive antibiotics. At some point I was prescribed with a super strong cortisone ointment (that I knew later wasn’t adequate to the vulvar area ). With this product my vulva was badly burned . I wasn’t able to wear any underwear, walk properly or sit. Since then the pain remained.
Through these ten years I’ve experienced pain every single day. It was about 6 years going from doctor to doctor (gynecologist, dermatologist, etc) and me leaving with nothing but comments like, “there’s nothing wrong with you'“, “nothing showed up on your tests”, “you need to calm down and relax”, “it’s all in your head”. For some time I actually became to think that I might be going crazy and fabricating my pain. Nevertheless I never gave up and continued with my search on different fields of medicine.
When I was 23 I got my diagnosis on provoked generalized vulvodynia. I”ve finally found a specialist in vulvar pain that heard me and valued my ailments. Finally someone that told me that my pain is real. It was a relief to be diagnosed after so many years of being neglected and silenced.
I”ve tried a lot of treatments to manage my pain like physical therapy, pregabalin/ gabapentin, anti depressants, lidocaine, opioids, acupuncture and even surgery in 2017 (vestibulectomy). My pain has decreased a little bit but not significantly but I keep trying with a multidisciplinary approach. I am now on my way to neuropathic procedures such as neuromodulation.
Living with this kind of pain for so many years led me to a path of reconnecting with my body and making peace with my pain. I am a psychologist and I have a degree in clinical sexology counseling. My pain led me to get closer to female healthcare. It led me to acknowledge that as a health care providers, we should listen and treat people with respect, sensibility and always always provide them with ways to deal and cope with this kind of situations. I have treated women with gynaecological problems and pain for some time and now I realize that I”ve made peace with my pain helping others with their pain, helping them healing or managing the pain. I am about to start a support group for woman with pelvic and vulvo-vaginal pain in Portugal.
I believe and hope that sharing my experience with other women can really help manage the disease psychologically. This kind of platforms like Peace With Pain are a huge help as well on this matter. Thanks for that! It hasn’t been easy (not a single day since I was seventeen), but now I’ve found a purpose that helps me get though my hardest days or weeks or months.