Fair warning: this one is frank. If you’d rather not read the words vagina, Vaseline and anus before your tea, come back after. Everyone else, settle in, because this is the symptom nobody mentions, and it very nearly ruined my Christmas.
It started in a hotel shower
Two days before Christmas Eve, a few years back. My friend and I had gone away for a few days, the way you do when you’re pretending you’re organised enough to have finished your shopping early. I used the little hotel shower gel. It stung a bit. I thought “mmm, that’s not nice”, rinsed it off, and forgot about it. We went out for the night.
The next morning something felt sore. Not alarmingly. Just that low, nagging “something’s up” feeling you get before a period, so I filed it under that and carried on. We went to IKEA, because of course we did, and somewhere between the lamps and the tea lights the soreness stopped coming and going and simply stayed.
The dinner I’d rather not have had
Home that evening, and out for dinner with my partner before he went off to his family for Christmas. All the way through the meal I was shifting about on the chair thinking, this really hurts, and this has never happened before. Back at home, things went the way things go on the last night before a week apart, and I couldn’t stand to be touched. I mean that literally. Anything beyond touching was out of the question. If you’ve never had to explain to someone that you’re not going off them, you’re just on fire, I don’t recommend it.
Christmas Eve, on all fours
He left for his family in the morning. I went to mine. I could barely walk to the car. Then a period arrived on top of it all, and for a moment I was almost relieved, because at least that was a thing with a name.
It wasn’t the thing. For three days I sat on my mum’s sofa unable to move. I couldn’t wear knickers, because fabric felt like sandpaper. I couldn’t wear anything at all down there, so there was blood everywhere, and I was past caring. When I had to get to the bathroom I went on my hands and knees, because standing up and walking was worse than crawling. Christmas dinner happened somewhere in the background. It was the holidays, so there was no doctor to ring, and even if there had been, what was I going to say? “I think I’ve broken my fanny on a bottle of hotel shower gel”?
“Ah. Vaginal dryness.” The words I’d never heard
The day after Boxing Day my mum went to the pharmacy and told them the story, because I wasn’t going anywhere. They heard about three sentences and said, “Ah. Vaginal dryness.”
Vaginal what? I was in my forties. I was not, as far as I knew, dry. I was on fire, bleeding and crawling. But that’s what it was. The skin down there had thinned and lost its moisture, the way it does when your oestrogen drops, and all it had taken was one harsh soap and a long walk round a furniture shop to turn it into an open wound. Doctors call it vaginal atrophy, or genitourinary syndrome of menopause, which is a lot of letters for “it hurts”.
The advice was simple. Keep the area open to the air as much as you can. A small amount of Vaseline, often, as a barrier. And one salt bath a day.
I paid for that salt bath
God, did I pay for it. Whatever the salt was supposed to do, what it actually did was spread the whole thing backwards, so that by the evening it wasn’t just the front, it was everything, right through to my bum. Every movement felt like someone was going at me with a small knife, at every available opportunity. I sat on the sofa in my mum’s living room over Christmas with nothing on but a sheet draped over me, so the air could get to it, because that was the only thing that didn’t hurt. Nobody has ever looked less festive.
Peeing was the worst. It stung so badly that I cried, every single time, for days. I felt sick with it. I felt low in a way I hadn’t before, the particular low of being in pain that nobody can see and that you can’t say out loud. And then, from nowhere, it eased. Not all at once. A bit less one day, a bit less the next. In total it took about six weeks to go.
What it actually needed
Here’s the part that makes me want to go back and shake myself. All it needed, really, was a little Vaseline every few hours, so that skin wasn’t rubbing against skin. That’s it. A barrier. Not the salt bath. Not the hotel shower gel, obviously, which I’d now only use to clean a bike chain. Had I known that on the first morning away, I’d have had a sore couple of days and a nice Christmas.
It’s not just you
I’ve since learnt that this is one of the most common symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, and one of the least talked about, because who’s going to bring it up over coffee? Vaginal dryness sounds like something minor. Something you’d sort with a cream and a shrug. What it felt like was being skinned. It’s the same thing behind the burning, the itching, the stinging when you pee and the painful sex that so many of us put up with in silence. For some women it comes and goes for years. For some, if you’re lucky, it happens once and that’s your lot. So far, touch wood, I’m one of the lucky ones.
But I’m writing it down because if one woman reads this on Christmas Eve, sat under a sheet, wondering what on earth is happening to her, I want her to know three things. It has a name. It is not an infection, you have not done anything wrong, and the soap was the trigger, not the cause. And there are proper treatments for it now, from a doctor, that are a long way better than my mum’s pharmacy and a tub of Vaseline. Ask. Say the words. The person across the desk has heard them before.
And if you’re keeping notes on your symptoms, put this one in. It’s exactly the kind of thing you forget to mention at the appointment because it was six weeks ago and you’d rather not. Write it down while it’s happening, and let the notes do the talking.
If this sounded familiar, there’s more where it came from. I send a note like this once or twice a month (the sign-up is at the bottom of this page), and the Hot Mess Community is where we carry on the conversation.
Hot Mess is a tracking aid, not a medical device, and none of this is medical advice. Vaginal dryness is common in perimenopause and menopause and is treatable: a GP or pharmacist can suggest moisturisers and, where appropriate, prescribe treatments such as local oestrogen. Soreness, bleeding or pain that is new, severe or doesn’t settle can have other causes, including infection, so get it checked rather than sitting it out on the sofa like I did.