The teenage years are rarely easy for anyone but Kelly Smith, now 22, from Bristol, had a particularly difficult time.
But it wasn't because of bad boyfriends or bullying classmates: Instead, aged 17, doctors broke the devastating news that she had been born without a vagina or a womb and would never be able to bear children of her own.
Worse, with a vagina just 2cm deep, sexual relationships were impossible - much to the teenager's dismay.
'The worst thing about the condition is how alone it can make you feel,' says Kelly, who is one of a small number of people to have Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome.
The syndrome, which affects one in 5000 people, usually results in a missing uterus in female sufferers and no genitalia whatsoever in males.
Difficult to detect, it wasn't until Kelly was 16 and still hadn't begun her period that doctors realised that something might be wrong.
It took an ultrasound and a visit to a specialist consultant in Bath before the diagnosis was confirmed. Kelly was devastated.
'It was very difficult to come to terms with,' she remembers. 'It is a relatively unknown condition and not many doctors have even heard of it.
'I was lucky in that I had a lovely nurse who put no pressure on me and was really supportive. Other than her there is very little support out there other than perhaps the odd Yahoo group. It’s a very isolating condition.'
Making matters worse was the impact it had on her intimate relationships, in particular with men, with an embarrassed Kelly reluctant to reveal what was really wrong with her.
'It has really affected my relationships,' she says. 'I put a barrier up around myself. My friends at school would start to get into relationships and would be talking about having sex and I would just nod along.
'I did have a relationship that went really well when I was 19. He didn’t know about the condition but he knew that I couldn’t have children.
'In the end I ended it because I didn’t feel like it was fair on him, I couldn’t deny a 22 year old man the chance to have sex and it got to the point when I just shut myself down.'
But Kelly, who appears on tonight's episode of Embarrassing Bodies (in the UK), has begun to come to terms with the condition and is currently having treatment to enlarge her vagina and make sexual relationships possible.
The treatment, called dilatotherapy, involves gradually stretching the vagina over six months to a year and Kelly says she is thrilled with how things are going.
'I started doing the therapy in October last year up until about Christmas and it was really good. But then it was a busy Christmas and I fell off the wagon,' she reveals.
'It is really effective and it’s fantastic that it requires no surgery but it is quite time consuming, and clinical.'
Although the treatment cannot replace her missing uterus, women with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome do have functioning ovaries and as a result can have biological children using a surrogate and IVF.
Not that Kelly is thinking about children just yet. 'Right now I am only 22 so I’m not really thinking about kids,' she says.
'I have a friend with the condition who’s 31 and it is really playing on her mind. Right now for me, I’m more concerned about having a normal relationship - I just tackle each problem as it comes.'
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