Laura: One in ten women has endometriosis. That's roughly the same prevalence as diabetes. Sophia: Wow, that's a huge number. Laura: It is. Yet it takes an average of seven to ten years and visits to multiple doctors just to get a diagnosis. This isn't some rare, obscure disease; it's a common one we, as a society, choose to ignore. Sophia: That’s infuriating. It’s not a medical mystery, it’s a failure of attention. A failure to listen. Laura: And that infuriating reality is at the heart of the book we’re diving into today: I Have Vagina Problems by Lara Parker. Sophia: Who is not just a patient, but a journalist, right? I read she's a director at BuzzFeed, and she started writing about this after her own diagnosis. It feels like this book was born from a place of absolute necessity. Laura: Exactly. It's part memoir, part manifesto. And it has resonated globally, getting translated into multiple languages, because this experience is shockingly, tragically universal. Let's start with the first major battle she documents: just getting someone to believe her.

Sophia: That’s the part that’s so hard to wrap your head around. The pain is one thing, but the loneliness of being told your pain isn't real… that’s a unique kind of cruelty. Laura: It is, and Parker documents it from the very beginning. She tells this story from when she was fifteen. She’s at basketball practice, a dedicated athlete, when she’s hit with this sudden, excruciating abdominal pain. It’s so bad she collapses in the locker room. Sophia: Okay, so a young, healthy athlete suddenly collapses in pain. That sounds like a clear signal that something is seriously wrong. Laura: You would think. Her coach finds her, calls her mom, and they rush to an urgent care clinic. And what the doctor says to her and her mother is just staggering. After a brief examination, he looks at her mom and says, "Your daughter is just sad, ma’am. I see this all the time. Something tragic happens in a young person’s life and they act out to get attention." Sophia: Hold on. He blamed her physical collapse on a cry for attention? What was his basis for that? Laura: She had recently lost a close friend, and the doctor seized on that. He completely dismissed the physical symptoms and told her mother to put her in therapy. He made a fifteen-year-old girl, doubled over in agony, feel like she was a liar. Sophia: That's not just a misdiagnosis; that's medical gaslighting. It’s planting a seed of doubt in your own mind about your own reality. And if a doctor won't believe you, who will? Laura: Precisely. And this becomes a pattern. In college, a gynecologist tells her the pain is just stress and anxiety. An ER doctor, after she collapses again, tells her to just "take Tylenol before your period starts," even though she wasn't on her period. Sophia: It’s like they have a rolodex of dismissals for women's pain: it’s your period, it’s your emotions, it’s for attention. Anything but actually investigating the physical cause. Laura: And even when she finally gets a diagnosis of endometriosis via surgery, the nightmare doesn't end. The first surgery she has is an ablation. And this is a critical distinction she makes in the book. Sophia: Right, I saw that. Can you break that down? Ablation versus excision. It sounds like a technical detail, but it seems to be a huge deal. Laura: It’s a massive deal. Think of endometriosis like weeds in a garden. Ablation surgery is like using a flamethrower to burn the tops of the weeds. It might look like you've solved the problem, but the roots are still there, and they’ll grow back, often angrier than before. Sophia: And excision? Laura: Excision is like carefully digging out the entire weed, root and all. It’s a much more specialized, difficult surgery, but it’s the gold standard for treatment. The problem is, many general gynecologists aren't trained in it, or insurance companies don't want to pay for it, so they just do ablations. Parker has this surgery, is told she's "fixed," and then her pain comes roaring back worse than ever. Sophia: So even the "solution" she was offered was a temporary, inadequate fix that ultimately left her in a worse position. It’s just failure at every level of the system. Laura: Exactly. And this brings up a point of criticism some readers had about the book. They found the detailed, graphic descriptions of her pain to be repetitive or overwhelming. Sophia: I can see that. But hearing these stories, it feels like that criticism misses the entire point. You have to describe the gut-wrenching reality of it. You have to make people understand that we're not talking about "bad cramps." We're talking about a life-altering, identity-stripping level of pain. Laura: I agree. I think the repetition is a rhetorical choice. It’s a political act. She’s forcing the reader to sit with the discomfort, to not look away. She describes one attack at work where she’s literally on the cold, dirty floor of a single-person bathroom, hyperventilating, convinced she's going to be fired for being sick. The detail isn't for shock value; it's to make the invisible visible. Sophia: It's to show the stakes. The stakes of being ignored are not just discomfort. It's years of your life lost. It's trauma. It's your career, your relationships, your sanity. Laura: And that’s the perfect pivot. Because after years of fighting the medical system, the battle doesn't just stop when you get a name for your pain. It moves into the most intimate parts of your life.

Sophia: Okay, so after years of fighting the medical system, you finally get a diagnosis. But that's not the end of the battle. The fight then moves into the most personal parts of your life, right? Like dating. What happens when the cultural script for love and sex is just… ripped away from you? Laura: That’s the central question of the second half of the book. Parker is incredibly vulnerable about how these conditions made her feel fundamentally broken and unlovable. The world tells you that relationships, especially new ones, progress towards sex. And for her, penetrative sex was excruciating. Sophia: So dating must have felt like a minefield. Laura: A complete minefield. She tells this story she calls the "First Date Disaster." She's 22, newly in LA, and so anxious about a simple coffee date that she spends 15 minutes typing and deleting texts to cancel. Sophia: Why so anxious? Laura: Because every single decision is filtered through the lens of her pain. She can't have coffee or beer because it might irritate her bladder. So she orders water, and then worries about how to explain that without sounding weird. She can't focus on the conversation because her mind is just running these disaster scenarios of how she would ever explain, "By the way, my vagina hurts all the time." Sophia: It’s like she’s not even on the date. She’s just managing a secret. Laura: Exactly. She leaves feeling exhausted and defeated. The experience reinforces this deep-seated belief that she is "too much," that her body is a problem to be hidden. This is her starting point: shame and fear. Sophia: Which is so heartbreaking. But the book doesn't stay there, does it? There's a real evolution. Laura: A profound one. And it’s a journey from shame to empowerment. Years later, after pelvic floor physical therapy and a lot of work on self-acceptance, she tells a story that is the polar opposite of that first date. Sophia: The breakthrough. Laura: The breakthrough. She's on a date with a guy she met on an app. They're having a great time, they go back to her place. As things start getting physical, she just blurts it out, as nonchalantly as she can: "Just so you know, I don't do penetration." Sophia: Wow. No apology, no long, tortured explanation. Just a statement of fact. A boundary. Laura: A boundary. And she fights the urge to apologize for it. And the guy’s reaction is everything. He just says, "Okay, cool. Just tell me if anything I do causes you any pain." And in that moment, she says, everything changed. She relaxed. And she had one of the most fulfilling, pleasurable sexual experiences of her life. Sophia: So it's a shift from seeing her body as a problem to be solved for someone else's benefit, to seeing it as her own, with its own rules for pleasure. The focus moves from what she can't do to what she can. Laura: Precisely. She has this great analogy in the book to help people understand this. Sophia: Oh, the peanut allergy one! I loved that. Can you explain it? Laura: Yes! She says, think of it like a severe peanut allergy. If you love someone and you know peanuts could kill them, you wouldn't keep trying to feed them peanuts. You wouldn't get angry that they can't eat a PB&J. You’d just say, "Okay, no peanuts," and find other things to eat. Her Vagina Problems are her peanut allergy. A good partner isn't going to be mad that they can't have "penetration peanuts." They're going to be happy to explore the thousand other things on the menu. Sophia: That is such a brilliant, simple way to reframe it. It takes the shame and the sense of "lacking" completely out of the equation. It’s not a deficiency; it’s just a fact. And it puts the onus on the partner to be creative and empathetic, not on her to endure pain. Laura: And it leads to this bigger idea of redefining what sex even is. Society, and especially the bad sex ed she got in school, taught her that sex equals penetration. Full stop. Her journey is about unlearning that. It’s about discovering that intimacy and orgasm and connection can happen in countless ways that have nothing to do with that one specific act. Sophia: It’s a liberation, really. Not just for people with chronic pain, but for everyone. The idea that you can write your own script for pleasure. Laura: It is. And it all comes back to that internal shift. The journey starts with her begging doctors to believe that her pain is real. But it ends with her finally believing that she is worthy, just as she is.

Laura: When you step back and look at the whole arc of the book, it’s this incredible two-front war. The journey starts with fighting doctors to believe your pain, but it ends with you believing in your own worth, regardless of that pain. The external revolution against the medical system has to be matched by an internal revolution of self-acceptance. Sophia: That’s it exactly. You can win the battle for a diagnosis, but if you still see yourself as broken, you haven't truly won. And Parker's ultimate message seems to be that this revolution is collective. It's not just about her story. It's about breaking the silence for everyone. Laura: Yes. She ends the book with this powerful, direct address to the reader who might be suffering in silence. She says, "I hear you. I see you. And I believe you." Sophia: And that's everything, isn't it? After all the dismissals, all the years of being told it's in your head, to have someone say those three simple sentences is life-changing. It’s the antidote to the gaslighting. Laura: It’s a call to action for all of us—to listen better, to advocate for ourselves and for others, and to challenge the stigma that keeps so many people suffering alone. What was your biggest takeaway from her journey? Sophia: That you can be in pain and still be powerful. That your life isn't over when you get a diagnosis like this; it's just… different. And that's okay. You get to define what a full, joyful, and pleasurable life looks like for you. The power is yours to reclaim. Laura: A powerful and necessary message. We'd love to hear what resonated with you all. Join the conversation on our social channels and let us know your thoughts. Sophia: This is Aibrary, signing off.