Vagina Read Free Page B

was atypical for me; and colors were just colors—they did not seem heightened after lovemaking any longer. I wondered: What is happening to me?
    Although nothing else in my life was going wrong—and though my relationship continued to be wonderful—I began to feel a sense of depression; then, underneath everything, a sense of despair. It was like a horror movie, as the light and sparkle of the world dialed downward and downward—now, not just after lovemaking, but in everyday existence. The internal numbness was progressing. I could not pretend I was imagining it. An emotional numbness progressed inexorably alongside it. I felt I was losing, somehow, what made me a woman, and that I could not face living in this condition for the rest of my life.
    I could not figure out, from anything I had researched, what could possibly be causing this incredible, traumatic loss. One late night, sitting by the cold iron woodstove, alone, frantic with questions, and feeling hopeless, I began literally bargaining with the universe, as one does in times of great crisis. I actually prayed, proposing a deal: if God (or whoever was listening; I would go with anyone who was willing to take the call) would somehow heal me—somehow restore what I had lost—and if I learned anything worth knowing in the process, I would write about it—if there was the least chance that what I had learned could possibly help anyone else.
    With a heavy heart—afraid to hear that nothing could be done for me—I made an appointment with my gynecologist, Dr. Deborah Coady. In this I was extremely fortunate, since she is one of the very few physicians who specialize in the aspects of the female body that, it would turn out, I was being affected by: problems with the pelvic nerve.
    Dr. Coady is a lovely woman in her forties, with soft light-brown hair that falls to her shoulders, and a face that has a certain expression of gentle fatigue and receptivity to others’ pain. Because of her specialty in female pelvic nerve disorders, and, in particular, in one of its painful variants, which thankfully I did not have, called “vulvodynia,” she often sees women who are experiencing a broad range of suffering. This has made her unusually careful and compassionate.
    Dr. Coady examined me, asked questions in a quiet voice, and finally told me she believed I was suffering numbness from nerve compression. I was so panicked at this point about what I was losing in terms of the emotional dimensions of my life and my sexuality—and so terrified of losing any more—that she took me into her private office.
    There, in an effort to reassure me, she showed me two “Netter images”—beautifully drawn full-color anatomical illustrations. Frank Netter was a gifted medical illustrator, whose images of various parts of the human body are visual classics, collected by some neurologists, gynecologists, and other specialists, to help them explain abstract medical realities, in a vivid way, to their patients.
    The first image depicted the way that the pelvic nerves in women branch out to the base of the spinal cord. 1 Another showed how a branch, which originates in the clitoris and dorsal and clitoral nerve, arches elegantly to branch to the spinal cord, while other branches curve sinuously, originating in the vagina and also in the cervix. The nerve branches from the clitoris and vagina go to the larger pudendal nerve, whereas the nerve branch originating from the cervix goes to the larger pelvic nerve. 2 All of this complexity, I would learn later, gives women several different areas in their pelvises from which orgasms can be produced, and all of these connect to the spinal cord and then up to the brain.
    Dr. Coady suspected that my problem was a spinal compression of one of the latter branches.
    But she wanted to assure me that because of the way women were wired, no matter how bad the spinal compression that she suspected I had might prove to be, I would never lose the