I Had Painful Sex For Years — Then I Found a Solution

The Symptoms

The first time Savannah Magruder tried to insert a tampon when she was 13, she cried out in pain. It was so agonizing that she never used another one throughout her adolescence. Using pads wasn't the end of the world, so she didn't think much about her tampon fail until she decided to have sex with her first boyfriend when she was 17.

"It was excruciatingly painful," she recalls. "I had been told it was going to hurt to have sex for the first time so I wasn't that weirded out, but we continued to try and it was almost impossible. It really sucked."

Around that time, she decided to get on birth control, so she went to her nurse practitioner. The nurse told her she first needed an STD test with a speculum — the medical device used to hold the vagina open during pelvic exams.

"When she inserted that, I screamed," says Magruder​, now a 22-year-old film student living in Brooklyn. "She said it was a little uncomfortable, and I was like no, that really hurts. By this point, I had really negative connotations with anything being inserted into my vagina."

Fearing something was truly wrong, she went to a gynecologist, but the exam revealed nothing abnormal. The gynecologist dismissively suggested she needed to do foreplay longer or try different positions. But nothing worked.

As the years went by and she went away to college, her sex life suffered. She didn't make any other doctor's appointments because she didn't want to tell her mother, who would have to pay for it. So she endured sex despite the terrible pain. But because she couldn't explain it, some guys she hooked up with got "super freaked out" and made comments that stung.

"One guy said, 'I feel like I'm raping you,'" she remembers. "I was clearly in so much pain. Another guy said, 'I can't teach you how to like sex.'"

Magruder​​ started dating a woman, which helped her avoid facing the issue, but when that relationship ended two years later, she decided it was time to seek help. "I didn't want to limit myself to just [dating] women," she says. So she finally told her mom about the pain, and decided to go to a new doctor for a real diagnosis.

The Diagnosis

Magruder​ found a doctor in New York who specialized in conditions defined by pain in the vaginal area. At her appointment, the doctor diagnosed her with localized provoked vestibulodynia.

The doctor told her this meant that the opening of her vagina had ten times more nerve endings than it should, causing chronic vulvar pain. And it's very challenging to manage because there's no treatment that (1) completely makes it go away or (2) works for everyone. Surgery was possible, but had a low success rate.


 "I was totally freaking out," Magruder​ says. "This was going to be a long painstaking process to figure out what treatment was right for me, if anything. Some people are never able to find any treatment that works for them. I was totally devastated."

The doctor told her about a cream that works for some people but that required a specialist to prescribe. She referred Magruder​ to Maze Women's Sexual Health. Without much hope, Magruder​ went to her appointment and was shocked by what the specialist told her: She didn't have vestibulodynia after all. 

She had vaginismus, a painful condition in which there is involuntary tightening of the vagina during attempted penetration or intercourse. The condition is believed to affect 6 to 12 percent of women, but actual statistics are hard to come by because patients often suffer in silence and many providers are unaware of vaginismus or how to treat it, according to Melissa Ferrara, MS, FNP-BC, Associate Medical Director at Maze.

Magruder​'s new doctor figured out that her pain was coming from the contraction of her pelvic floor muscles rather than from nerves in the tissue surrounding her vagina. 

"The underlying cause of vaginismus is variable," says Ferrara. "There is usually some combination of physical and non-physical triggers that cause the body to anticipate pain, and unconsciously tighten and tense the vaginal muscles. This causes a viscous cycle of anticipation of penetration, the body reacting by tensing the vaginal muscles, then painful penetration, which further reinforces the fear."

But the good news is that with proper treatment, the cure rate can be as high as 90 percent.

The Treatment

"It was really great to hear," Magruder​ says of her finally accurate diagnosis, which only happened a couple months ago. "It's been extremely awesome and empowering for me to go through treatment because a lot of it is doing it yourself at home."

Her doctor gave her a series of eight dilators ranging in width from a finger to the size of an average penis. For ten minutes every day, Magruder​ lies on her bed at home, plays some relaxing music, and inserts one of the dilators to get her vagina comfortable with penetration.

"Once you conquer one dilator and can put it in without pain, you go on to next size up," she says. Every week or so, she graduates to the next size. Right now, she is on the second-to-largest size and is almost finished with her treatment. 

"It can be an emotional process," she admits. "Vaginismus is a mental and physical reaction — it's completely involuntary; your muscles are reacting in the same way as if something is coming toward your eye and you blink. Once you've made the connection [not to expect] pain, that's what really breaks the spell."

Since her diagnosis and successful treatment experience so far, Magruder​ has been on a mission to raise awareness about the condition.

"The more people know about it, the more willing people will be to get treatment. It shouldn't be a shameful thing," she says. "It's an isolating condition to have and I want to prevent that in as many other people as possible."