Jackie Liu says that a few years before her ovarian cancer was diagnosed, her libido plummeted. The San Diego resident thought that maybe the stress in her life was at least partly responsible for her lack of interest in sex. “But was my libido decreasing because cancer was developing? I don't know," she says.
After her diagnosis and surgery, Jackie found that sex with her husband was very difficult. "It was very, very painful," she says, "because I had vaginal dryness." But she was also worried about how the surgery had changed her anatomy, and what that meant for a healthy sex life.
Read More "I didn't really know the concept of something as simple as what happens when you have sex but you have no uterus," she says. "My cervix is shut, so I wondered where the semen would go. All these organs are gone, so does it just go randomly in my abdomen? I had to talk to my gyno just in general about how to have sex again." Until that point, none of the doctors or others on her medical team had brought the subject up. "No one talked about sex or how hard it would be until I asked," she says. "I had to seek out the answers myself." For Jackie and her husband, getting their sex life back on track is still a work in progress. "My husband's on deployment," she says, adding that the couple has had few opportunities for sex in the past two years. "And it sucked," she says forthrightly. "So I'm looking forward to maybe it not sucking one day!"
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