Evian, whose friends were also unable to communicate with each other, ran into a different kind of friction. Because menopause was the result of surgery to cure cancer, many of her loved ones thought she should be grateful she no longer had cancer, she says. “A lot of people didn’t understand that two things can be true: I can be grateful for my life and also very upset about what’s happening to my life, that I no longer have a uterus.”
Sexual side effects are especially difficult to navigate at a young age.
As Evian puts it, the vagina can change during medical menopause “from waterfalls to the freaking Sahara desert” boost your sex life. It can be caused by a decrease in estrogen levels the vulvovaginal tissue shrinksand drying and prone to tearing– which can make sex, especially penetration, seriously painful. “For the first time in my life, when I was thirty-something, I had to look at my husband and say, ‘Okay, we have to go get lube,'” Evian says. “It rocked my marriage, and it was also heartbreaking not feeling sexy, sensual, or any of the things that make being a woman fun.”
Pettit was less than a year into dating her current husband during cancer treatment when she experienced vaginal dryness. “Sometimes we tried to be intimate, but I often broke it off because it was so painful,” says Pettit, who was taken off menopause-inducing drugs after completing chemotherapy. At a certain point in the treatment, when she was increasingly shying away from the pain and her partner was afraid of hurting her, she began to feel that it wasn’t worth trying, “not even with lube,” she says, “and we had to be open and honest about that.” She has since become a mother.
