One day author Susanna Kaysen woke up and realized that her vagina hurt
- a lot. And it didn't stop hurting. She explains, "If you have
a vagina you know that most of the time it is without sensation... How
do your kidneys feel? How does your pancreas feel? Luckily, we have
no idea how these things feel. The vagina is mostly like a pancreas
and feels nothing. If it feels something it is either erotically engaged
or ill. All this is obvious if you have one. But half of us don't. I
have one and something went wrong with it. "
Kaysen takes us
on a poignantly funny but emotional year-long medical journey as she
tries desperately to discover the origin and treatment of her pain.
We feel the effects of her condition and how it plays on her relationship
with her boyfriend, whose impatience, unlike his sex drive, wears thin.
We encounter an array of doctors, specialists and generalists, nurses
and alternative health care professionals, each offering an opinion
or remedy, none of which offered a cure.
This true story
became so frustrating that eventually Kaysen began to write about it.
She reveals the strain of living with intractable, inexplicable pain,
and she wonders how her mind may be implicated in both the cause and
a possible cure. Sidelined from erotic pleasure and the sexual subtext
that drives our culture, Kaysen unselfconsciously uses this unusual
lens to explore the way lust and sexual vigor shape our sense of ourselves.
This honest, adventurous,
comical and sometimes emotional story reminds us of the frustrating
failures of modern medicine, the intricacy of sexual pain, and the importance
of not only listening to our bodies, but also our hearts.
Excerpt from Exploring Womanhood's interview with
Susanna Kaysen
Nancy: So many women end
up on emotional journeys related to their sexual or medical health and
experiences. Your story is valuable in that it helps us, as women, realize
that the journey may need perseverance, some self-examination, and a
good dose of humor. What else is essential in order to understand the
pain and then heal?
Susanna Kaysen: I don't like to restrict what
I'm saying to women. Well, of course, men don't have vaginas, so the
particulars don't apply to them. But I don't think this is about the
particulars so much. Some, but not all. The point about there being
unfixable problems about the decline of sexual energy and sexual appeal,
the sorrow when you find part of your self has been compromised because
of a change in your physical functioning, because of health, really--
these have nothing to do with gender. These are normal human sadnesses
and worries.
The end of your
question regarding what is essential in order to understand the pain
and then heal contains one of the basic flaws in our reasoning, since
I don't think everything can be healed. Some things can improve, some
things can get stabilized, some things get worse. Some things, of course,
do heal. But not all things! I wish we, as Americans, (I feel Americans
are particularly hung up on this) could stop with the positive thinking
already! I'm more into negative thinking. I think it's more realistic.
