At the start of a new relationship, sex expert Nadia Bokody ended up in the doctor’s office with a very surprising diagnosis.
Have you ever had your life before your eyes? I have.
Well, more specifically, my sex life.
It happened as I was lying on a cold latex mattress while a GP looked under a covered surgical cloth sleeve over my pelvis.
“Ahhh, yes. I see what you mean. He looks inflamed,” he noted.
That’s not how I planned to go today.
My new pressure was already on its way to see me, having done most of the Orange crossing to Sydney.
We had met on Tinder when I was what they call, a “gay baby” – still green for same-sex dating and very naive about the world of pain I was about to get into.
As someone who passed their twenties and early thirties convinced that I had emotional cold because I never cried over a breakup, I learned that this was one of the many overlooked signs that I was in fact gay and very capable of making myself to hurt; when it was from another woman.
But I digress.
She was a miner who faced her own mortality in the middle of the month, sailed on excavators hundreds of meters underground and spent the other two weeks in Sydney.
Sex simply changed lives. How to see the world in full color for the first time.
I savored every moment as if it were the first bite of a delicious meal.
“Okay, I get it now. You’re gay. You’re VERY gay!” she had laughed the first time we slept together; after commenting, I thought she was “a heterosexual girl, experimenting” when we initially met.
It was quick and frivolous, but I fell in love overwhelmingly and embarrassingly.
Something no one tells you about going out much later in life is that it essentially makes you go back to adolescence.
Since then, I have discovered a whole community of self-confessed “late-flowering lesbians” through TikTok confirming the existence of this phenomenon.
Between the ages of thirty and fifty, they are women who, like me, had relationships with men for decades before accepting their extraordinary. And it could be forgiven for confusing them with a group of teenage girls who took hormones from puberty; synchronizing her lips dizzyingly with love songs and throwing anguished monologues about her insatiable sexual impulses.
Everything would look terribly worthy if I hadn’t experienced it myself.
“It’s like a second puberty,” a late-flowering companion explained to me.
“Because you never had any if you went out later in life. We (the later ones) spent our teens trying to fit into the box of guys we like and having sex we didn’t like. Then you let yourself fall in love- you have women and sleep with them and you can’t get enough of them. You’re almost making up for lost time. “
In fact, during my first girlfriend’s visits to Sydney, we did very little more than make up for lost time.
And when she returned to the mine, I found myself as one of TikTok’s late lesbians: our last encounter playing in an attractive loop in my brain, my vibrator suddenly needed a frequent recharge.
Unfortunately, another thing no one tells you about how it will turn out later in life, is that there is such a thing as overstimulation.
He was accustomed to sporadic solo sex before this point, and the kind of heterosexual couple women know best: focused on penetration.
But my second wind of puberty, along with the clearly inverse dynamics of sex with another woman, meant that the typically unrecognized part of my vulva shifted from a secondary character to a lead role overnight.
A role for which he was evidently unprepared.
Since only a couple of weeks passed in our incipient romance, I felt a sudden increase in pain in my pelvis.
“It’s probably just an easily treatable STI,” a friend assured me over the phone.
“Everyone has one at some point. Go to the doctor and have it looked at. But in the meantime, you should probably avoid sex and tell your girlfriend,” he added.
As someone special to see the same GP, I usually book my appointments days in advance. But with my new strait already halfway to Sydney and the possibility of abstinence and an awkward conversation approaching, I abandoned protocol and booked panic with the only doctor available that afternoon.
An hour later, I was detailing my phantom pain to a GP who looked suspiciously young for having graduated in medicine.
“Okay, well, there aren’t any doctors who can look at it today, so would you like me to book you one in the morning?” he asked, looking at a stack of notes in front of him, as if trying to look away.
“No. I need to look at it right now,” I urged, spontaneously losing all decor and starting to pull on the zipper of my jeans desperate for an answer.
“Uh, okay. Let me out and grab a nurse to be present. You can jump in bed while I go … ah, yeah. Do this,” he began, noticing that I had already I shamelessly pulled out my jeans and threw myself on the bed.
“Now we’re going to pass you blood and urine, but the good news is that this doesn’t look like an STI,” she commented moments later, from the end of the bed.
“How can that be ?!” I protested, recalling a Google search I had done before that suggested I had a rare and potentially incurable infection.
“I’m sure you just … eh …” He paused to clear his throat awkwardly.
“You’ve overstimulated your clitoris. Take a break from the vibrator for a few days and maybe find other things to do with your partner,” she finally finished, looking relieved to have said the words.
“Are you sure? Can you take another look?” I insisted, tossing the cloth of modesty so that I could see my situation more clearly: any feeling of reluctance reserved for such an occasion already gone.
“I’m sure,” he refuted, pulling the curtain around me abruptly.
He was right.
A few hours after my girlfriend arrived in Sydney, my results returned negative and after a few days of rest, my vulva also returned to normal.
Even though I last saw her more than a year ago, I still think fondly of my first girlfriend and the world of sexual possibilities that our romance unlocked in me, as well as the lessons that n ‘I extracted.
Undoubtedly, the most important thing is that, as it turns out, I am not immune to lovelessness. All these scenes from women’s movies crying in Ben & Jerry’s tubs while listening to sad songs are really accurate.
Also, queer sex doesn’t have a definite endpoint, so as a general rule, you should always store Gatorade when your long-distance girlfriend is in town.
And this second wave of puberty? Hit hard. So, calm down with the vibrator and the nights full of passion, unless you want to have your whole sex life in front of your eyes in a doctor’s office.
Follow Nadia Bokody on Instagram and YouTube for more content on sex, relationships and mental health.