fi macrae
It was the classic endo story, really. The pain started out mild when I was 23, but soon intensified to the point where I was collapsing on the floor or in the shower. My doctor said it was just period pain, and I was like, “OK, cool.” It was my partner at the time who eventually said I should get a second opinion.
It was a slog, but one mass the size of a tennis ball on my left ovary and several surgeries later, I got my diagnosis. I’ve been in and out of hospital for the past five years. That’s probably been the biggest impact on my sex life: the medical trauma. I wish I’d known going into diagnosis how invasive that process is, particularly as a young person with less of an intimate knowledge of my body and sense of pleasure. You can wake up from surgery feeling pretty violated – you don’t really know what has happened in your body. It can be hard to then transition from that to the bedroom. I thought, “How am I expected to find pleasure and intimacy in a space that’s become so painful and clinical?”
Initially I just wanted to separate my disability from sex and pleasure completely. But then I started to develop rituals to redirect my associations with medical appointments and my
