A teenager has spoken of her 'total shock' at being told at the age of 17 she had no vagina. Jacqui Beck, 19, has MRKH, a rare syndrome which affects the reproductive system - meaning she has no womb, cervix or vaginal opening. She was only diagnosed after she went to her GP about back pain - and mentioned in passing that she hadn't started her periods.
Tests revealed her condition and that where her vagina should be, there is simply an ident, or 'dimple' - meaning she is unable to have sex or carry her own child.
Women with the condition appear completely normal externally - which means it is usually not discovered until a woman tries to have sex, or has not had her first period.
Miss Beck, from the Isle of Wight, admits when she was first diagnosed, she felt 'like a freak'.
'I'd never considered myself different from other women and the news was so shocking, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I was sure the doctor had got it wrong, but when she explained that was why I wasn’t having periods, it all started to make sense.
I left the doctors in tears - I would never know what it was like to give birth, be pregnant, have a period. All the things I had imagined doing suddenly got erased from my future. I was really angry and felt like I wasn’t a real woman any more.'
Because she had never attempted to have a physical relationship, Miss Beck had never noticed the problem herself. Had she tried, she would have discovered it was impossible for her to have sex. But after suffering from pain in her neck in summer 2012, she went to see her GP.
'While I was there, I mentioned I hadn’t started my period yet. I still wasn’t overly worried but I thought it was worth saying something.
My doctor was very surprised but didn’t seem to think it was serious. He just suggested that he would do some scans to see what the problem was.'
When scans showed nothing, she was referred to a gynaecologist, who immediately spotted something was wrong. Miss Beck said:
My other scan results had been sent to her and just from looking at them, she knew I had MRKH. She sat me down and basically explained that I didn’t have a womb, or a vagina, that I was born without them and instead just had a small dimple in it’s place.'
MRKH affects one in 5,000 women in the UK. Most discover they have the condition because they haven't started their periods, but some find out when they struggle to have intercourse.
Dailymail.
No comments:
Post a Comment