A journey of self-discovery provides intangible rewards. One woman discovered something inside her whose removal cured her of a tangible illness. Why it took ten years for her to discover the cause is a mystery neither she, by her own admission, nor anyone else will ever solve.
Ten years before a 38-year-old Scottish woman walked into a hospital complaining of sepsis, a life-threatening systemic infection, she and a partner had used a sex toy. While the sex – and we’re speculating here – may have been unforgettable, the sex toy was not. It remained forgotten, in place, eventually causing the woman to shake, and present symptoms of fatigue, incontinence and dramatic weight loss.
Missing the Nick of Time
The woman had forgotten that the five inch object the couple had used to enhance their experience remained in the woman’s vagina after coitus. It remained there for a full ten years. While it seems a story only the tabloids could love, there was no entertainment value in it for our Scottish lady. The forgotten sexual aid had, over time, lodged inside her vagina, eventually pushing into her bladder. Complications ensued. By the time she walked in the hospital (undisclosed in the Journal of Sexual Medicine report, but believed to be sometime in 2013), she was suffering from vesicovaginal fistula (VVF), an abnormal urine flow into the vagina, and obstructive uropathy, in which the flow of urine reverses from the bladder back into the kidneys, due to bladder blockage. It was only when found, that the woman remembered using the object with her partner a decade before.
Awareness and Safety
The obvious questions erupt. How could the woman be unaware? Why did she take so long to seek help? The woman was found to be of normal intelligence and free from any other medically urgent conditions. She had not been abused, nor was she suffering from depression or psychosis. The object lesson is two-fold: Great sex should come with a safety warning, and the capacities of the human body still have the power to astonish us.