Vulvodynia Symptoms Prior to Painful Intercourse

The beginning of my experiences with provoked vulvodynia is blurry.

I have gaps in my memory… some spanning years of my childhood… as a result of childhood trauma. I’ve been able to recover some memories through trauma therapy, but I still have large chunks of my childhood and early teenage years missing from my memory vault.

What I’m trying to say is that despite my long, complicated, intertwined, and emotional relationship with my body… it is difficult to pinpoint the first time that I felt any vulvovaginal discomfort or pain.

The first noticeable, traumatically painful vulvovaginal experience that I couldn’t lock away and forget was on my honeymoon… though, even then, my brain worked hard to pretend everything was fine. In fact, my brain worked really hard during the first few years of my marriage to dissociate from the experiences and memories of painful intercourse — but I couldn’t pretend everything was fine for long… newlyweds. And so, because my brain’s go-to coping mechanism of forgetting wasn’t possible, I was forced to actively live with the fact that intercourse was painful and the trauma that took over my life.

My (ex)husband and I were both raised in very conservative, religious homes and were both virgins before getting married. Neither of us was prepared for the pain that intercourse would cause me… neither of us was prepared for the trauma it would weave into every fiber of our marriage.

But that’s a blog post for another day. Today I want to focus on pre-marriage symptoms. Hindsight is 20/20, which allows me to reflect on the experiences that could have tipped me off to something being not quite right. I want to mention them here, in case they resonate with someone else.

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Vulvodynia Pain While Riding a Bike

I hated riding bikes. I’m not sure when that hatred started, but it was fairly young… definitely at or before preteen status.

It surprised me how other people enjoyed riding bikes. I regularly thought to myself… Isn’t it uncomfortable for everyone? Did they just get used to it? Was I weak somehow because I couldn’t just get used to the pain?

To me, riding a bike feels like I weigh 5 times more than I do… and all that pressure is centralized in my vulva and vagina. The seat feels like it is stabbing into me… stabbing through me. My feet carry none of the weight. Shifting more towards my rear relieves none of the pressure in my vulva. Even using a wider bike seat never did much.

Cycling class was torture. Believe me, I tried that in 2013 and I vowed NEVER. AGAIN.

Recumbent bikes, however, are a different story and I could generally tolerate them even before becoming pain-free. And, amazingly, I have ridden a bike without pain a few times since healing my vulvodynia!!

Every few years growing up, I would think that somehow I had outgrown my distaste for bikes… but 30 seconds on one always reminded me. I even had a bike in college and never… not once… used it. Instead, I gave the bike to my roommate and opted for the 20-minute walk to and from campus.

In 2016, I had a general physical therapist (who was pretending to be a pelvic floor physical therapist… yeah, more on that another time) ask me to do an exercise on an upright bike. Even after I explained the pain it would cause me, she insisted that I just try. So I did.

30 seconds was all it took before I started sobbing. I was trying to be tough and work through the pain, but I think I lasted on the bike for a whopping minute before her conscience caught up with her and she told me I could stop.

I was in pain for hours afterward.

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Period Management (aka Sandpaper & Glass)

Oh, tampons… the bane of my teenage existence.

A necessary evil… but not anymore! I had a hysterectomy and will never have a period again. I guess that’s one perk of having your uterus fall out of your body. Thanks, prolapse! Anyways, I digress…

Honestly, for years, I just assumed that tampons were painful for everyone and I suffered through the pain alone. It never really occurred to me to bring it up with friends or family. Menstrual cycles had enough of a taboo already and I didn’t want to call more attention to… periods.

Sometimes inserting and taking out tampons was no big deal, but other times it was awful. The silver lining was that the pain was pretty short-lived. I usually didn’t suffer for hours afterward (like I did with bikes or like I later experienced after intercourse).

As a teenager, my family bought tampons with a cardboard applicator… you know, the kind with the dry cotton sticking out of the top? The very first time I used said tampon, I didn’t know that I was supposed to remove the cardboard and I left it inserted. A few hours later, I was in the locker room at my Junior High changing for tennis practice when I casually called from the stall how I might need to miss practice because wearing a tampon hurt. My friend explained it wasn’t supposed to hurt and talked me through the steps-of-inserting-a-tampon until I realized my mistake.

At some point, tampons became regularly painful (even when I used them correctly and didn’t leave 3 inches of cardboard stuck up my vagina). I know cheap, cardboard tampons aren’t the most comfortable things on the planet for anyone, but in my case, the hard cardboard poked like glass if I misjudged my insertion angle and the exposed cotton dragged across my vaginal wall like sandpaper (hence, the previous name of my blog Sandpaper and Glass).

The most painful tampon experience for me was removing a dry tampon (if you know, you know). I’ve spoken to other womxn who hate this sensation… with vulvodynia, it wasn’t just uncomfortable. It literally felt like the skin inside my vagina was being ripped out. I am not exaggerating.

You might be asking yourself– why didn’t you just use pads, Grace? Great question. I used pads or wadded-up toilet paper during my lighter flow, but on heavy days my period would not work well with just pads. I wish it did… it would have saved me from a lot of very painful experiences.

Over the years I developed a pattern for how to deal with my period without triggering vulvodynia pain. On lighter days, I would use pads or toilet paper (as I mentioned before). Then, on day two or three I would switch to the heavy-flow routine. I used regular sized tampons with the smooth, plastic applicator (splurging on Tampax Pearl was a non-negotiable in my budget). With a super heavy flow, it often meant that I was switching out tampons frequently for a day or two… but that inconvenience was better than having to deal with the pain of larger tampons. In 2016, I discovered period underwear and menstrual cups. Cups were not really on my radar because I didn’t want to go through an awkward and painful learning stage where I had to figure out insertion and removal of anything else in my vagina. It was painful enough already, thank you very much. However… PERIOD UNDERWEAR changed my life and they were a staple for managing my cycle since the glorious day I wore my first pair.

I should work for period underwear companies, I recommend them so much.

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Growing up, I was admonished over and over regarding sexual purity… and my perfectionism complied. So, apart from bikes and tampons, I have no memory of anything else that was in close proximity to my vagina until I got married at the age of 20.

The next part of my story will focus on my engaged/newly married self–and highlight the ways in which I was woefully unprepared for painful sex.

This post was originally published in my previous blog, Sandpaper & Glass on 11/20/2017. I migrated my previous blog content to this new site in 2023. A lot has changed from when I originally wrote this blog post to now. Edits have been made to reflect some of those changes while maintaining the integrity of the post. For full transparency, you can read the original post here.

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Hindsight is 20/20: What symptoms of your vulvovaginal pain did you experience before becoming sexually active? Please share them in the comments!