Tag: lives
Orgasms trigger my endometriosis: The sex lives of people with endo
Tumbling into bed after a rare date night out with my partner should feel like an antidote to the monotony of days spent lying on the sofa in near constant pain. Instead, it almost always ends in tears.
What’s valued as the epitome of pleasure, orgasms seem to trigger a flare up in my already sore body. As the clothes ripped off in haste lie scattered on the apartment floor, half drunk wine glasses sit stained by the sink, I lie awake for hours, writhing in pain, mourning the loss of another part of myself taken over by disease. Chronic illnesses, including endometriosis, rule my life. They dictate when I can enjoy myself and when I cannot. They’ve already taken away a lot from me — spontaneity, delicious meals, nights out, trips away, and yes, sex too.
Sex seems to be ubiquitous with pleasure. In the age of sex positivity, women and non binary folks are reasserting sexual desire as something they feel empowered about. So, where does that leave the people who want to have good sex but can’t? Those that have willing partners but still find pleasure physically hard to find?
I had undiagnosed pelvic pain for over 10 years before receiving an endometriosis diagnosis in January 2021. This was followed by invasive testing and abdominal surgery, with even more operations on the horizon. Two thirds of people who live with endo experience sexual dysfunction as a result, but there is a societal resistance to discussing sex when it intersects with chronic pain and an assumption those of us who are frequently unwell are not participating in acts of pleasure.
Endometriosis is a chronic health condition affecting 1.5 million people in the UK, 6.5 million in the U.S. and WHO estimates 190 million women of ‘reproductive age’ are affected globally. Symptoms vary, and it occurs throughout the body, where cells similar to the lining of the uterus grow outside of it, often in the bowel, stomach, and pelvic areas. Despite how many people live with endometriosis, we do not know what causes it and doctors cannot find a cure. I have been cut open once already this year and less than six months later my pain is returning to pre-op levels. The only way to discover how many more lesions have grown is to be cut open again, and again, routinely, for the rest of my life.
For a disease that affects so many, it is chronically underdiagnosed and the average wait time for an official diagnosis after the onset of symptoms is eight years. Even with diagnosis, those living with the illness are often ignored, with some doctors still claiming pregnancy or birth control can be used as viable treatment options. The disease lacks research funding, like many other types of dyspareunia — the medical term for sexual pain — that affect people with vaginas, such as vaginismus and vulvodynia. Erectile dysfunction, affecting people with penises, has 1954 clinical trials currently published on PubMed, compared to 393 for dyspareunia. It is the historic disregard of female pain, under the assumption we will grin and bear it, that results in ongoing medical misogyny.
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Tegan, a young non binary person who has lived with dyspareunia since they began having sex, says they feel frustrated with the lack of control they have, that their body won’t do what everyone else is doing. “You’re supposed to enjoy it. It hurts and I bleed every time,” they tell me. “I feel angry at my body, like something is wrong with me.” This idea of ‘normativity’ sees painful sex often not discussed. Instead, it is often a burden we carry alone, secrecy compounding feelings of shame. Journalist Lucia Osborne Crowley’s recent book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, documents experiences of sexual violence that often have consequences in later intimate relationships, writing that “the most important gatekeeper of shame is our determination to not give people the words they need to speak freely about themselves.”
For Ellie, it was painful sex that alerted her to discovering her endo — a common experience for those with it. She’s been with her partner throughout the diagnostic process and subsequent medical intervention. “My sex life was the main thing that was disrupted,” she says. The symptoms of the disease are varied, affecting our digestive systems, bowel movements, and hormonal cycles, but because Ellie, like many others, had the mirena coil — a type of intrauterine device — fitted, she said she wasn’t experiencing painful periods, often a hallmark symptom of endometriosis.
Although I had severe pain prior to having a consistent sex life, it was my own bleeding during sex with a long term partner that finally convinced my GP to refer me to a specialist, uncovering my extensive endometriosis. It makes me wonder: Why was my pain not taken more seriously before I started bleeding during sex?
I questioned Ness Cooper, a sexologist, on my own intimate woe. It’s something I thought I was entirely alone in until connecting with other endo sufferers — is it really possible that orgasming is triggering my endo flares? She demystified the experience I had been afraid to ask my doctor about. “There is scar tissue from the uterus’ lining in the pelvis and even vagina, vaginal contractions from orgasm could be the painful cause,” Cooper explains. “If the individual is experiencing muscle spasm, they may find that orgasm can trigger the spasm to set back in after orgasm and struggle to continue with penetration for a while afterwards.”
Ness also suggests a number of practical steps partners can try to make penetration enjoyable for all involved. She invites the use of foreplay in the form of massage: “a warm sensual massage with a body safe massage candle can help relax muscles that may be prone to spasms.” She also suggests laying on top of a heated pad or electric blanket, to provide some warmth and relief during sex.
The idea that penetrative (or penis in vagina) sex is the only legitimate way to have sex is rooted in heteronormativity. Megan, who has been in a long term relationship since her endometriosis diagnosis, praises her partner, saying, “Penetration was off the table for a while and my partner understood. We spent time trying to work on non-penetrative intimacy.” However, old habits die hard, and many people living with endo and struggling to enjoy penetrative sex are left feeling sexually deficient. Although there are plenty of other ways to find pleasure with a partner beyond penis in vagina sex, Tegan says, “Sometimes as someone with a vagina, I crave that intimacy of having someone inside me, which just isn’t possible at the moment.”
I asked the endo community what they’ve found useful through trial and error. Megan suggests a penetration bumper like the OhNut. The device works as a physical barrier that is worn on the penis, to prevent it inserting too deep into the vagina, which combats the deep pain associated with endo-related dyspareunia. It is made from a soft pliable polymer and comes as a stack of four rings that can be customised to suit the length you desire. Megan says it’s the best tool they found to make PV sex enjoyable, as it avoids hurting herself but allows her partner to enjoy a simulation of those deep sensations. Meanwhile, Tegan says getting comfortable using non-penetrative toys with new partner has helped them enjoy sex again, describing a clitoral stimulator toy as the best thing they’ve discovered.
If you’re reading this and have a pain free pleasurable sex life, I’m stoked for you. Those of you who thought you were alone, whether you have endometriosis or any other pain condition, I want you all to know there is a community of us trying to make sex fun and talking about it a lot more too. This isn’t the end of that conversation.
This article was originally published on Dec. 10, 2021.
Hitting the Books: Could we zap our brains into leading healthier lives?
Deep Brain Stimulation therapies have proven an invaluable treatment option for patients suffering from otherwise debilitating diseases like Parkinson’s. However, it — and its sibling tech, brain computer interfaces — currently suffer a critical shortcoming: the electrodes that convert electron pulses into bioelectric signals don’t sit well with the surrounding brain tissue. And that’s where folks with the lab coats and holding squids come in! InWe Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds, author Sally Adee delves into two centuries of research into an often misunderstood and maligned branch of scientific discovery, guiding readers from the pioneering works of Alessandro Volta to the life-saving applications that might become possible once doctors learn to communicate directly with our body’s cells.
Excerpted from We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Lost in translation
“There’s a fundamental asymmetry between the devices that drive our information economy and the tissues in the nervous system,” Bettinger told The Verge in 2018. “Your cell phone and your computer use electrons and pass them back and forth as the fundamental unit of information. Neurons, though, use ions like sodium and potassium. This matters because, to make a simple analogy, that means you need to translate the language.”
“One of the misnomers within the field actually is that I’m injecting current through these electrodes,” explains Kip Ludwig. “Not if I’m doing it right, I don’t.” The electrons that travel down a platinum or titanium wire to the implant never make it into your brain tissue. Instead, they line up on the electrode. This produces a negative charge, which pulls ions from the neurons around it. “If I pull enough ions away from the tissue, I cause voltage-gated ion channels to open,” says Ludwig. That can — but doesn’t always — make a nerve fire an action potential. Get nerves to fire. That’s it — that’s your only move.
It may seem counterintuitive: the nervous system runs on action potentials, so why wouldn’t it work to just try to write our own action potentials on top of the brain’s own ones? The problem is that our attempts to write action potentials can be incredibly ham-fisted, says Ludwig. They don’t always do what we think they do. For one thing, our tools are nowhere near precise enough to hit only the exact neurons we are trying to stimulate. So the implant sits in the middle of a bunch of different cells, sweeping up and activating unrelated neurons with its electric field. Remember how I said glia were traditionally considered the brain’s janitorial staff? Well, more recently it emerged that they also do some information processing—and our clumsy electrodes will fire them too, to unknown effects. “It’s like pulling the stopper on your bathtub and only trying to move one of three toy boats in the bathwater,” says Ludwig. And even if we do manage to hit the neurons we’re trying to, there’s no guarantee that the stimulation is hitting it in the correct location.
To bring electroceuticals into medicine, we really need better techniques to talk to cells. If the electron-to-ion language barrier is an obstacle to talking to neurons, it’s an absolute non-starter for cells that don’t use action potentials, like the ones that we are trying to target with next-generation electrical interventions, including skin cells, bone cells, and the rest. If we want to control the membrane voltage of cancer cells to coax them back to normal behavior; if we want to nudge the wound current in skin or bone cells; if we want to control the fate of a stem cell—none of that is achievable with our one and only tool of making a nerve fire an action potential. We need a bigger toolkit. Luckily, this is the objective for a fast-growing area of research looking to make devices, computing elements, and wiring that can talk to ions in their native tongue.
Several research groups are working on “mixed conduction,” a project whose goal is devices that can speak bioelectricity. It relies heavily on plastics and advanced polymers with long names that often include punctuation and numbers. If the goal is a DBS electrode you can keep in the brain for more than ten years, these materials will need to safely interact with the body’s native tissues for much longer than they do now. And that search is far from over. People are understandably beginning to wonder: why not just skip the middle man and actually make this stuff out of biological materials instead of manufacturing polymers? Why not learn how nature does it?
It’s been tried before. In the 1970s, there was a flurry of interest in using coral for bone grafts instead of autografts. Instead of a traumatic double-surgery to harvest the necessary bone tissue from a different part of the body, coral implants acted as a scaffold to let the body’s new bone cells grow into and form the new bone. Coral is naturally osteoconductive, which means new bone cells happily slide onto it and find it an agreeable place to proliferate. It’s also biodegradable: after the bone grew onto it, the coral was gradually absorbed, metabolized, and then excreted by the body. Steady improvements have produced few inflammatory responses or complications. Now there are several companies growing specialized coral for bone grafts and implants.
After the success of coral, people began to take a closer look at marine sources for biomaterials. This field is now rapidly evolving — thanks to new processing methods which have made it possible to harvest a lot of useful materials from what used to be just marine waste, the last decade has seen an increasing number of biomaterials that originate from marine organisms. These include replacement sources for gelatin (snails), collagen (jellyfish), and keratin (sponges), marine sources of which are plentiful, biocompatible, and biodegradable. And not just inside the body — one reason interest in these has spiked is the effort to move away from polluting synthetic plastic materials.
Apart from all the other benefits of marine-derived dupes, they’re also able to conduct an ion current. That was what Marco Rolandi was thinking about in 2010 when he and his colleagues at the University of Washington built a transistor out of a piece of squid.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-we-are-electric-sally-adee-hachette-books-153003295.html?src=rss
Meet Rebecca Peach, CEO and Founder at Funeral Comparison and Booking Site: Legacy of Lives
Legacy of Lives is the only free online independent funeral comparison and booking site, we support consumers from start to…
The post Meet Rebecca Peach, CEO and Founder at Funeral Comparison and Booking Site: Legacy of Lives appeared first on TechRound.
The Beyond Confusing Lives of Kang the Conqueror
When Jonathan Majors made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in Loki, he was merely “He Who Remains,” an enigmatic being who claimed to be policing the timeline to prevent other incarnations of himself from wreaking havoc. Once he was murdered (by Loki variant Sylvie’s hand), however, those other incarnations were …
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Choose a career that changes lives
THREE Christmases ago, Sheila, now 83, a resident at Churchfields Care Home, received a treasured gift from care worker Faye – a silver friendship-knot necklace.
It’s a symbol of the bond that’s blossomed between the pair as they tend tomatoes in Churchfields’ greenhouse and Sheila wears it every day.
“I love my job and my friendships with residents like Sheila,” says Faye, 25. “I used to work in retail, supervising the tills at a garden centre, but I wasn’t fulfilled. Every day was the same.
“Then I spotted an advert for this job online. When I came for interview, I was struck by the atmosphere at Churchfields – it’s so warm and homely. ‘I’ll give it a go,’ I thought.
“Six years later, I’m still here. Coming into work and bringing a smile to the residents’ faces is a joy. I’m making a positive impact in the world.”
If you’re looking for a rewarding career, why not consider the adult social care sector, like Faye?
The only qualifications required are a kind disposition, good communication skills and a desire to make a difference. Training is provided on the job and you’ll gain qualifications as you progress.
There’s a wide range of roles on offer, supporting the elderly and people with physical or learning disabilities with everyday tasks in residential care or their own homes, and the hours are flexible.
You could even invite someone who needs support into your home as a Shared Lives care worker.
Faye’s an activity coordinator for Churchfields’ 33 residents but also assists with caring duties, such as preparing breakfasts: “Churchfields provided me with all the training I needed – for example, using hoists.
“Some of our residents are bed-bound, others have dementia and there are a few who could run a marathon tomorrow. That’s what makes my job interesting.
“There’s lots of nattering over cups of tea, but I organise activities too, like our Wednesday coffee morning and quiz in the local pub.
“Music therapy is one of my favourites – watching a dementia patient who’s been closed off suddenly smile is wonderful. And we’ve just started going ice skating – everyone loves it.”
I organised a skydive through a virtual-reality headset. It was amazing – the lady had her arms out as if she really was floating through the air
Every year, Faye organises a treat for each resident, asking: “What do you dream of doing?” She’s taken people swimming and horse riding, and was undaunted when one lady announced her dream was to skydive.
“I organised a skydive through a virtual-reality headset,” she recalls. “It was amazing – the lady had her arms out as if she really was floating through the air, and she screamed and laughed with excitement.”
Sheila’s passion is gardening so she and Faye spend time together on Churchfields’ allotment or in the greenhouse, picking lettuces, tomatoes and runner beans for the chef to cook.
“Shelia loves to give me life advice,” smiles Faye. “‘If you’re going to get into trouble, don’t get caught’ is one of my favourites.”
“Faye is there for me all the way,” says Sheila, a former machinist at a car factory. She has lived at Churchfields for
five years.
“Dogs used to be a big part of my life – at one time, my husband Roy and I had six rescues. So Faye brings her dog JJ in to see me. She’s wonderful.”
It’s the opportunity to forge relationships like Faye and Sheila’s that makes a career in adult social care so unique.
And that’s why Abbey, 23 – a care worker for Visiting Angels, which offers care packages to people in their own homes – loves her job too.
“There’s so much satisfaction in supporting others,” says Abbey. “My clients range from people in their twenties and thirties with health conditions to the older generation and palliative care.
“Some people want support with housework, others just a chat. It’s all down to the individual.”
But, while Abbey is a care worker, she also feels cared for herself, through her employer’s attitude to their team.
“We can study towards qualifications in areas of care that particularly interest us – dementia, for example,” she explains.
“And when I came back to work after having Delilah, who’s 18 months old now, I was offered my choice of hours.
“It’s great – I’m with Delilah all day, then when my partner Brandon, a builder, comes home from work, I leave for my evening shift. I do Sundays too and overtime is always available.”
A fulfilling, varied job that fits around your life – a career in adult social care is one of a kind.
Could I get a job in adult social care?
There are so many different kinds of care for adults that jobs in this field are really varied.
Do I need to be a nurse to do it?
No, these kinds of job are not medical, they’re all about enabling people (aged 18 and up) to live their daily lives as well as possible.
Do I need qualifications?
Not at all – a passion to make a difference and good communication skills are all you need. There will be support and training you can do on the job and, in some cases, qualifications to work towards.
What kinds of jobs are available?
From working with residents at a care home to supporting someone with disabilities in their own home, there’s a wide range of jobs. Some are even live-in, if that appeals to you.
I’ve got family commitments, can I work part-time?
Yes. There are lots of different options available for adult social care workers, including flexible working.
THERE ARE JOBS AVAILABLE IN YOUR AREA NOW!
Simply visit adultsocialcare.co.uk and type in your postcode to be matched with a role that could be right for you. The website also contains plenty of information about careers in care, including CV and interview tips.
Find a job in care near you today at adultsocialcare.co.uk