Libido

Right so I'm sitting here trying to write down my symptoms before I see the GP and I've had to describe my own body in ways I have never said out loud to another human being. 'Dryness'. 'Discomfort'. 'Loss of interest'. I sound like a very sad Ocado substitution notice. Anyway I'm doing it because apparently just going red and saying 'everything's a bit... you know' is not useful clinical information. If anyone else has found a way to write this stuff down without wanting to fold themselves into a bin bag, do let me know x

Right so I have been trying to work out how to write this post for approximately three weeks, which tells you everything about how embarrassing I find this whole subject, and yet here I am at 11pm on a Wednesday typing it into my phone because apparently that's where we are now. Act one: something changed. I couldn't have told you exactly when. My husband and I have been married for 31 years and somewhere in the last couple of years intimacy just became... a thing I was quietly dreading rather than a thing I was interested in. Not because of him. Because of me. Because of what was happening to my body without anyone sending me a memo about it. Act two: I said nothing. Obviously. Because how do you even start that conversation? "Darling, I appear to have become a completely different person from the waist down and I'm not sure what to do about it"? I just kept making excuses and feeling quietly awful and also occasionally googling things at midnight in an incognito tab like a teenager. Act three: I finally wrote it down. All of it. On a piece of paper. In very small handwriting. Because I had a GP appointment coming up and I thought, if I don't say it out loud to someone I am going to carry this around forever. The writing it down bit actually helped more than I expected. Made it feel like a real medical thing rather than just me being broken. I haven't had the appointment yet. It's next week. I am absolutely going to bottle it and talk about my blood pressure instead. But maybe not. We'll see 😂 Anyone else taken ages to actually say this stuff out loud? x

Hello everyone. I've been lurking here for a few weeks and I finally feel brave enough to ask this because I genuinely don't know how to handle it. I have a GP appointment coming up and I really want to talk about dryness and some discomfort I've been having, but every time I rehearse it in my head I just... freeze. I'm 59 and I've been with my husband for over thirty years and I still can't seem to say it out loud to a doctor without wanting to disappear into the floor. Which is ridiculous, I know. It's not just dryness either. There's a sort of rawness that comes and goes, and a couple of times I've had what felt like a UTI but the test came back clear, which apparently can be a thing? I read something about that here last week actually. And the libido piece, well. I don't even know where to start with that one. My husband is kind about it but I can tell it's affecting us and I hate that. I've been writing things down so I don't bottle it when I'm actually in the room. Things like: when it started, how often it bothers me, what it feels like, the UTI-type symptoms. I want to ask about local oestrogen because I've seen it mentioned here a lot, but I don't even know if I'm using the right words or whether my GP will just brush past it. Has anyone found a way to bring this up that doesn't feel mortifying? Or even just a way of framing it so the GP takes it seriously? I'd be so grateful. x