A Surprisingly Sane Blog

Last night some time after 1:00 a.m., I was sitting half naked in my bear-claw bath tub, shaking and rocking back and forth while the inside of my va-jay-jay experienced the worst burn I’ve ever felt besides the ring of fire during natural child birth. What a way to start off the new year, eh?

That is one natural yeast infection remedy that I will never try again.

I’ve mentioned before that yeast infections and I go way, way back, but I don’t think I’ve ever truly gone into detail.

Until now. (Dum dum duuuuuuum!)

I get more yeast infections a month than most humans probably get their entire life. For whatever reason, I’m horribly prone to them and always have been. Diet, herbal supplements, yogurt, voodoo, prayer, and just about every other natural remedy has never been able to rid my body of the infections completely. Battling an extreme amount of yeast is just a way of life for me.

When I was seven months pregnant with Julie, I had a yeast infection that got so out of control that I ended up in the hospital. Yeah, it was that bad. Thrush with breastfeeding was a given… nothing I did could keep it from happening.

My body is, apparently, the perfect environment to host yeast. Which is really disgusting when you think of it. Let’s not go into detail because it kind of grosses me out… and we all know that the last thing I need to do is obsess over how broken my vagina really is. Once I get started, my mind blows it out of proportion and I’ll end up babbling about the demons in my hoo-haw on the streets of downtown Seattle.

So anyway, when I went to my new midwife/naturopathic doctor for my annual pap smear last month and she discovered at first glance that (*gasp*) I clearly had a yeast infection, I asked if there was a remedy other than Monistat that I ought to try to get rid of it. If I use the over-the-counter medications too often, they stop working, so I try to use them only when my infections are at their worst.

She recommended a number of things and we settled on one that I hadn’t yet tried… these natural suppositories that are supposed to be used only once a week along with a vinegar douche 12-24 hours after insertion. Now, I’ve never done a douche before because I always learned that the vagina is a self-cleansing organ, and douching disrupts the natural balance of blah blah blah… but whatever. At this point, I’ll try darned well near anything. So I bought the bottle of vaginal suppositories and finally got the nerve to try it out last night to attempt to fight the bad case of burning and itching that was doomed to keep me awake.

Insertion was easy enough. Just stuck it up there like one of those OB tampons that I had to use while I was in Europe. At first, nothing. I went to bed.

About five minutes later, steam and fire spurted out of every orifice on my body. My vagina was burning… and not in a good baby-I-need-to-fuck-you sort of way. When I say it was burning, I mean I was ready to call the firetruck to come save me.

I spent the next hour sweating and shaking while my hoo-haw screamed in agony. I tried shoving a garlic clove up there to neutralize the burn. Tried wiping the homeopathic remedy out as well as I could. Sat in tub of warm water. Nothing could get rid of the burn, and I was ready to scoot my ass across the floor like a dog and howl at the moon when finally, finally, the pain began to slowly subside.

Needless to say, I woke up with a stiff neck to accompany the bizarre, tea-tree-oil-smelling discharge falling out of the southern end of my body. And I am unsure whether I actually survived last night’s horrific agony, or if this is the ghost of Tamra typing this morning’s entry to forever haunt my blog readers.

Holy crap, just the memory of the pain is making me sweat. If yeast can survive those sort of extreme conditions, then so be it. I surrender.

Current Mood: Alarmed