A teenager has spoken of her 'total shock' at being told at
the age of 17 she had no vagina. Jacqui Beck, 19, has MRKH, a rare syndrome
which affects the reproductive system - meaning she has no womb, cervix or
vaginal opening. She was only diagnosed
after she went to her GP about back pain - and mentioned in passing that she
hadn't started her periods.
Tests revealed her condition and that where her vagina
should be, there is simply an ident, or 'dimple' - meaning she is unable to
have sex or carry her own child.
Women with the condition appear completely normal externally
- which means it is usually not discovered until a woman tries to have sex, or
has not had her first period.
Miss Beck, from the Isle of Wight, admits when she was first
diagnosed, she felt 'like a freak'.
'I'd never considered myself different from other women and
the news was so shocking, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I was sure the
doctor had got it wrong, but when she explained that was why I wasn’t having
periods, it all started to make sense.
I left the doctors in tears - I would never know what it was
like to give birth, be pregnant, have a period. All the things I had imagined
doing suddenly got erased from my future. I was really angry and felt like I
wasn’t a real woman any more.'
Because she had never attempted to have a physical
relationship, Miss Beck had never noticed the problem herself. Had she tried, she would have discovered it
was impossible for her to have sex. But after suffering from pain in her neck
in summer 2012, she went to see her GP.
'While I was there, I mentioned I hadn’t started my period
yet. I still wasn’t overly worried but I thought it was worth saying something.
My doctor was very surprised but didn’t seem to think it was
serious. He just suggested that he would do some scans to see what the problem
was.'
When scans showed nothing, she was referred to a
gynaecologist, who immediately spotted something was wrong. Miss Beck said:
My other scan results had been sent to her and just from
looking at them, she knew I had MRKH. She sat me down and basically explained
that I didn’t have a womb, or a vagina, that I was born without them and
instead just had a small dimple in it’s place.'
MRKH affects one in 5,000 women in the UK. Most discover
they have the condition because they haven't started their periods, but some
find out when they struggle to have intercourse.
Dailymail.
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