Reply To: I don’t know what to try

[mazemelissa]

Hi Dizzie, Welcome to the forum.
It does sound like vaginismus you are struggling with.

Anxiety is often a central component of vaginismus, your body’s involuntary fear/phobia of penetration, which then creates tension and spasm of the vaginal muscles which make it painful and often impossible to penetrate.

The core of a home treatment program will be working on anxiety reduction, and slow penetration with dilators, learning to desensitze yourself and continue to reduce fear surrounding the penetration. This can take a while, but often once you start with the smallest dilators, and can have some success, continueing to work up in size gets easier. Anxiety medications can be helpful as well.

If a home program is unsuccessful, and you can not get even the smallest dilator sizes inserted, than you can consider coming to Maze for our procedure using Botox injections and progressive vaginal dilation under anesthesia. The procedure helps to treat the muscle tension with the botox and the dilation, but also help with the anxiety and fear, as we will insert a large dilator into your vagina while you are asleep under anesthesia, and then you wake up from the anesthesia with the dilator inside of you. We also numb the vaginal area, so you don’t feel any significant pain. When you wake up from the anesthesia, you are quite relaxed, as the medicaitons used are great for anxiety, and we then guide you and educate you on how to do dilation exercises. This has been very powerful for our patients who have never been able to dilate before. It really helps them connect their mind and body. Something that was once impossible, is now possible.

Another benefit of the procedure, is that we often find women have unusually thick or tight hymenal rings. And we are able to cut these and create a wider more open vaginal entrance, which helps tremendously for ease of penetration.

For women who feel like they have tried everything, this procedure can be a game changer.

Melissa