Someone Save My Sex Life!

I didn’t have an attachment to my ovaries until they were in jeopardy. I’ve never been the girl so in touch with her body she knew she was ovulating. When I was angry and irritable I just thought I was in a bad mood I didn’t realize it was PMS. Even when I was pregnant I was shocked that sex worked, cells were dividing and a baby growing, because I never felt pregnant for the first 6 months except for my missing periods.

I didn’t really talk about my period with anyone not even girlfriends. I didn’t avoid it, I just felt like it was a non-topic. I take that back. It wasn’t a non-topic it was just a private thing for me. It represented womanhood, although I never really thought that at the time that thought is just apparent to me now in retrospect. I didn’t talk about it because when I did complain about it or jabber about it in any way it cheapened the whole thing and made it sound disgusting and horrible when it really was natural and fine. Yes it was a pain in the ass sometimes, but life is full of pain’s in the ass no need to point this one out. Anyways at one point in my young girl head I prayed for it to come like a rite of passage into adulthood so it felt foolish to complain now.

As a kid you always rush to grow up and rightly so in my mind. You have no control over anything and that’s tough! People are in charge of when you go to bed, what you eat, where you go, you name it it’s done for you. As an adult we long for someone to put us down for a nap every day after lunch, but I empathize with kids on the lack of control thing. For me starting my period would be one step closer to the freedoms of adulthood. I think most girls want that day to come. There’s always some girl who is a complete woman in seventh grade while you are still playing with your Polly Pockets. For me that girl was Stephanie. She was gorgeous throughout junior high and high school. She had nice round boobs and a figure you had never witnessed on someone your own age and announced she got her period when she was in 5th grade. By the end of eighth grade I was still trying to go through puberty. In 10th grade I only weighed 80 pounds and my measurements were 27”X27” X27”. A bean pole comes to mind. A pretty bean pole I thought. I had good self esteem I just wished I’d become a curvy, hormonal girl like Stephanie or my mom who I thought was gorgeous, so I was sure I had the gene pool to do it.

In the end I didn’t get my mom’s gorgeous figure my sister did. I always felt feminine, but not all womanly like my sister who was stacked in all the right places and swept all the dad’s off their feet while they took pictures of her and her friends in their driveways before prom. I went more for the alternative, artsy college girl look. I figured if you can’t be one thing, be another.
Then fast forward a marriage, a couple kids and lots of maturity later. I finally, at 37, felt good! I hit my stride and it was glorious. I decided I still kind of wanted those boobs I never got and had them added on and for the next 3 years I really felt womanly. Then the breast cancer struck. I got through that, but then they wanted the ovaries out.

Suddenly I was protective of my ovaries. I loved them. You took the breasts and reconstructed them why the ovaries? Soon I would be a man. Well there’s a little thing called the BRCA 1 gene that has gone haywire in my family and it ups your chances of ovarian cancer by 50%. Breast cancer has nothing on ovarian cancer! My mom had had both and was fortunate to have lived, but not all my relatives were able to get through the ovarian cancer and it was a horrible thing to watch. So I couldn’t find one doctor to join my Keep Tammie’s Ovaries team. Everyone wanted them out before they caused problems.

They came out.

But wait a minute no one told me anything about menopause except for there will be hot flashes. I found out quickly menopause can be rude! Without losing all class it threatened to take my sex life away or at least make it the most boring orchestrated process ever. Once again I was only 39, married 20 years and still liked my husband. We were doing well in the sex area until this whole thing. I decided right then and there I would fight for my sex life!

As I write this I hesitate. Menopause has a bad social stigma. It’s like announcing you’re no longer vital (but hello you are). The second you mention it your hotness factor decreases by 100%. I admit that some of that comes from within my mind, but I’ve seen the look on people’s faces and I’m pretty good at reading people. There was all kind of preparation for starting my period. My mom talked about it, my dad talked about it, my friends talked about it and my school educated me about it. There’s a million commercials and movies talking about periods, but menopause….it’s whispered quietly behind a hand held to the mouth and called…”the change”. Change to what, old? I realized quickly it didn’t mean “old”. However, my girl parts were feelin’ old.

What happened to my fountain of youth, it seemed to dry up and shrivel. Consequently, as my husband made advances which I would normally have enjoyed I was deathly afraid. It was like making sparks and starting a fire down there! Okay there was KY Jelly but I seriously wanted to throw that stuff at the wall, actually I did once. I’m not a girl who needs that, at least I didn’t want to be, and it didn’t work well.

After the “the anger” went away I decided to rethink this give some things a try and look at this as an adventure with the hub. We would work through this. We did this we did that. It was fine, but it wasn’t great and I was actually getting depressed about it and ended up crying after sex one night saying I was ruined, done, over. I was at a low point. I was so pitiful I actually brought tears to my husband’s eyes which is hard to do. He’s not a crier. He told me this is not over. He pointed out it is not in my nature to quit or to despise myself. He knew I would figure this out.

So I did.

I went to my gynecologist and told her what was up. I told her we had to figure this out. She asked if I was willing to try a topical estrogen if my oncologist agreed. Why hadn’t anyone mentioned this before? Shouldn’t it be just part of the hysterectomy check up? I talked with my mom, my husband and myself and we all agreed that even though estrogen was my enemy as a breast cancer survivor with a broken BRCA 1 gene, sex made life worth living to some extent and I was willing to take a little risk for a lot of gain. In the end surviving is different from living and I want to live life not just survive cancer.

That topical estrogen was like a fountain of youth to my vagina! If it would take the years off my face like it did my vagina I would rub it on my face.

Why do I feel the need to tell this story…because it seems that no one felt it important to take a pro-active stance about my sex life and menopause like they did about my cancer. It didn’t seem to be any big deal to my doctors or our culture to talk about menopause and its natural ramifications unless I brought it up. If I wasn’t an extrovert with the ability to talk about private topics would my sex life be dead? Would I have assumed that that part of my life was over for my husband and I? Do people assume that woman don’t care if their sex life dies?
I don’t know what would have happened, but I do know we need to start thinking about this differently. So I thought I’d bring it up and hopefully in a positive way because I’m still vital. Maybe this will save someone else’s sex life!