My vagina is broken. Done. Finished. Tired and dusty. I didn’t even get to give her a send off party either.

No one prepares you for a broken vag when you’re 40 and diagnosed with breast cancer. Your doctors, your friends and family, your whole entire world is focused on surviving. And not just surviving death, surviving everyday life.

“All of the side effects you’re experiencing from treatment are temporary and treatable “ my onc says. They give me pills and creams to deal with my physical changes as they come. And once the hair is gone from my head, losing hair everywhere else isn’t so bad for me. Or my husband, for that matter.

He is excited for ALL my new baldness, and I’m so grateful he’s attracted to me, so much more in love with him because he’s steadfastly by my side, that our sex life (when I’m feeling well), is actually pretty good. It was like falling in love all over again. Even if I physically wasn’t feeling it, or feeling myself, having his unwavering support made me want to be good to him in every way possible.

Fast forward a year and a half – all my major breast cancer treatment is behind me, I’m healed from all my surgeries and I’m back to being a wife and mommy. But something’s different. Off. Exercise and surgery has me feeling confident about my outward physical appearance, but sex is not in my vocabulary. Nor is it in my brain or my body.

Sometimes I cry, for no reason at all. Sometimes I’m jolted awake (during winter time), completely drenched in sweat. And sometimes when my husband goes to touch me, I just want him to stop. Sex hurts. Every position. I’m dry. I’ve got small cuts on my vaginal lips. It burns. Sometimes I feel as if I want to cry during sex because not only is it extremely painful, I want to cry because I keep thinking, “what’s wrong with me?”

When I see my doctors and talk to them, I realize this is all from medically induced menopause – having my ovaries taken out and having no estrogen has flipped a bunch of switches in my body. Until my body adjusts itself, this is how I will live. Knowing this all, I still feel guilty. I feel sad. I love my husband. I want to be with him physically. How am I supposed to fix this?

Now here we are, six months later. Have things improved for us? In some ways, yes. Physically things down below are better. I don’t have to buy the expensive, daily vaginal moisturizer anymore, otc stuff works fine. We’ve figured out what positions are the most comfortable, too. But mentally, I don’t see much improvement. I have absolutely no libido. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get any of it back either. I’ve even gone so far as to schedule sex, thinking that maybe planning it to “get my head in the game” will help me, us, but sometimes I just can’t follow through.

I wish that doctors who treat women for breast cancer would see that this is absolutely a huge problem in our community. I don’t know if it’s taken very seriously. I wish I’d been forewarned. I wish that there would have been some kind of mental and/or physical exercises put in place that I could’ve started before my oophorectomy. I wish someone would have said point blank what I might experience. Thankfully, there is a one man army waging war on sex issues on behalf of us – Dr. Don S. Dizon. I was so happy to have heard him speak at the Young Survival Coalition conference in Austin this year. He was so open, so refreshing, I thought, “He gets it!”. I wish we had more doctors who approached survivorship and sex the way he does.

I don’t mean to come off as ungrateful or whiny. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about where I am and where I could be. I understand that life is different after a cancer diagnosis, I’m different. And most days, I’m happy. Trying to find fulfillment has been fun and interesting. I’ve learned to accept and embrace everything that has changed in my life up to this point. I just wish there was some type of magical duct tape to fix my broken vagina.