Corbis
When most of us think about the risks of oral sex it starts and stops with STDs, but sex injuries aren’t only limited to actual intercourse.
In an article on Cosmo, a woman detailed a horrific vulva injury she endured when an overeager ex she hooked up with on a random night essentially sucked the life out of her vagina. Here’s how it went down.
On a Saturday afternoon almost three weeks ago, I found myself lying on a medical table with my legs spread wide open in stirrups. My labia were completely black, and so swollen and in so much pain that I couldn’t even touch them or see my vagina. I got there because a guy went down on me.
I’d found my ex at a bar the night before and decided to walk back to my place with him. We hooked up. During the oral sex part of our drunken hookup, I noticed I was in some pain but didn’t really care too much. I just told him to slow down or ease up. I hadn’t had to tell him that before, but it’d been a while since we hooked up and there was all this built-up tension — I think that’s why he was being so aggressive.
We tried to have sex after that, but I couldn’t do it because my vulva hurt and I couldn’t even get his penis near my vaginal opening. When I went to put my pants back on to walk back to the bar, I noticed my labia were a bit larger than usual but thought it was nothing — maybe I was just still turned on or something — and we walked back together.
The woman said when she went home that night she knew her labia felt swollen but she assumed she’d be fine in the morning. Things actually got worse when she woke up and saw that “my entire labia area was completely black — it was so swollen I didn’t know where I was peeing from or where my vagina was. I couldn’t wear underwear or sit right or drive. I had to walk with my legs super far apart. When I peed, it burned, and when I walked, it felt like little needles were poking me.”
After going to a walk-in clinic and dealing with the shock from a nurse, a physician’s assistant, and a doctor that this type of reaction happened from having oral sex, the ob-gyn explained what happened from a medical standpoint:
Basically, this guy sucked my labia so hard that all the capillaries in one of the most sensitive areas of my body broke. Not only that, but he literally sucked the first layer of skin off my inner labia — I hadn’t been able to see it myself, but the ob-gyn told me there was bleeding in my inner labia and it looked like really bad rug burn. None of the doctors had seen anything like this before, except for, like, little girls who hurt themselves on their bike seats or get straddle injuries.
Ouch.
So what’s the remedy for an injury like this? According to the woman:
The ob-gyn prescribed pain killers and told me to ice it and not wear any tight clothes. I bought, like, five pairs of sweatpants and wore those for a week, and spent the weekend icing my labia in 20-minute intervals. I waddled around campus all week — it was five days before I could walk normally — and when people asked what was wrong, I just told them I pulled my groin during a workout.
Other than being scarred from oral sex, the woman said it took about a full week for the swelling to go down and three weeks later she’s now completely healed, at least physically.
