u/ustaboo

Bless whoever decides to read all of this and tries to help lol

I’m getting a second swab done for BV in a few days because the initial treatments last month didn’t seem to make it fully go away. I will say that before I first got checked out, I’d been dealing with the infection for probably a year with it progressively getting worse (I was just hesitant to get checked and it was also hard to find a gyn that was fully covered and also had good patient reviews), so I kinda didn’t expect the treatments to work but I still hoped for a miracle lol.

However, I feel like the symptoms have kinda tapered off since I contacted my gyn about it and now I feel kinda embarrassed going in knowing that I’m not having as much of an issue anymore these last couple of days, even though it felt much more real and torturous in the previous week? I will say sometimes the irritation or itching makes a brief visit but it tends to be mild/manageable, nothing compared to what I’d experienced during the relapse of symptoms. And tmi I guess, but there is a smell, though I don’t know if that’s just my baseline or something close to it because I haven’t been normal down there in a long time.

Not only that, but the discharge is pretty minimal now, so I’m worried that’ll affect specimen collection. She’s gonna do a blind swab and also a speculum exam, as well as a urine collection because for the past few weeks I feel like I’ve been having urgency/incontinence that might be related to the infection. It’s just weird because it kinda feels like the urgency has also been pretty tame the past few days and now I just feel like I’m going back for testing for no reason, even though the signs were very evident just a week ago.

The different symptoms have been coming and going as they please but they’ve all come to a standstill within the last two days or so which makes it harder for me to gauge the whole thing. Part of me hopes that they return before my appointment even though it’s torture to deal with because it would make me feel more validated in my visit.

I’m still gonna go get checked out because I’m afraid that if I don’t then it’ll come back in full force again (like it was before I got treated) and I’d have to go in again anyways. Aside from voicing my paranoid concerns I’m also trying to ask: will the specimen collection be compromised if I’m not having tons of discharge like I was just before? Like, would the amount of fluid they’re able to collect significantly affect the results?

I’m 23 and been abstinent all my life. So I got a swab done a month ago after what was I think a year’s long infection with BV and after the diagnosis confirmed it I did two separate courses of antibiotics, neither of which seemed to have work. Now my doctor wants me to go back in for another swab but she also mentioned a pelvic exam.

Has anyone had this done for BV? I’m not sure if she means a full pelvic since I don’t see the reason for the bimanual exam part of it, or if she just means the speculum portion which I’ve also never had done to me and never want to, but I’m really hesitating to go now. I was already apprehensive to go many times in the past and is the reason why I waited so long to get it checked to begin with despite the infection torturing me. Continuing to deal with BV even after a year of hell sounds less debilitating at this point

Edit: just want to add that I really hate being a woman because of shit like this- it feels like the procedures are just meant to desecrate us. It’s either suck it up and get a violating assessment done or avoid help and continue to suffer (which might happen anyways even if you brave the testing they do on you, which is how it feels in my case). I’m actually so tired