The timeline for my bombed vagina starts when my father punched me in the face in one of his tirades when I was about 12 years old. About a decade later I had a hole in my skull the size of a quarter. The nerves of two teeth had died, typically due to blunt force trauma, and infection was taking the place of bone. My dentist put me on antibiotics to knock out the infection before I could have surgery to clean out the decay in the skull and seal it off. The antibiotics took a full year to kill the infection, thereby beginning 15 years of inflammation in the form of countless vaginal yeast infections and urinary tract infections, that ultimately morphed into systemic candida and interstitial cystitis, replete with chronic burning in my vagina and urinary urgency. This made sex very uncomfortable, albeit painful. The pain was at its all time high when I met my future x-husband and it came to shape our sex life.
Now that I know about how antibiotics ruin the gut microbiome and cause intestinal permeability, and then brain fog, muscular and joint pain, hormonal imbalance, I realize that I was having a full body implosion, as inflammation and dysbiosis ruled my every day. But it was the bomb that went off in my vagina that caused me the most burning and searing physical pain. Its many years later now and with the aid of functional medicine, acupuncture, herbs, supplements, homeopathic, the elimination of sugar, processed foods, gluten and soy from my diet, I am much better. My exploded vagina has healed through trial and error- and the extreme avoidance of antibiotics. And if I indulge on sweets very occasionally, my vagina lets me know in no uncertain burning terms to lay off, so it can get laid again.
