Sex, Chemo, and Poisoned Parts
Our very modern love story
At 39, my wife, lover, and mother to our kids is enduring treatment for breast cancer. Next week she’ll have the fourth of eight chemotherapy cycles. This is an illness short on upsides, but here’s one: I’m closer than ever to the woman I love. But the downsides are more plentiful, and I’ve discovered a new one: poison vagina.
She and I are intimate in all the best ways. We’re emotionally connected, mutually supportive, and we have sex. We went into this cancer journey in a good place. But we’re finding… complications.
Not the worst but certainly the strangest complication is this: We can’t have unprotected sex. That’s because the chemotherapy treatment — that poison in a bag — is thought to make its way through her entire reproductive system, including her vaginal canal. It hangs around for the few days following treatment, waiting to poison a vulnerable part of me that was only there in the hope of a pleasant end to the evening.
This is a bit disappointing. My wife had trouble with the contraceptive pill, and then trouble with a contraceptive implant, so we switched things over and had to use condoms for several months until I had a vasectomy earlier this year.
*Interlude*
They tell you a vasectomy is a minor procedure — a snip, a limp home, and back to work in the morning — but don’t believe it! I had a hematoma, six weeks of constant, mild pain, and the truly memorable midnight post-coital blood drama.
But back to our story. We had to wait months to see if the vasectomy had worked, but in the very same week we got confirmation there were no swimmers in the pool we got the cancer diagnosis and all bets were off. To put it another way, we’d been looking forward to the spontaneity and intimacy of unprotected sex, and now we have to worry about poison vagina.
But that’s far from the only headwind, working to limit our sex life. Chemo is known to hit the libido, bringing dryness to the mouth and… elsewhere. At the same time, they’ve used strong meds to limit the function of her ovaries, in what is effectively reverse HRT. Injections have obliterated the magic hormones that might just conjure sex between a tired, stressed couple that just got their kids to bed on a freezing Tuesday in November. She’s not suffering terribly, but her bones often ache and she has daily headaches. In short, cancer is deeply unsexy, and then the stuff they do to you makes matters even worse.
We saw this coming. In the weeks before her mastectomy, and then in the run-up to chemo, we had loads of sex, as if to bank it in advance of leaner times. On the weekend before her first chemo cycle, we went away to a nice hotel for what we Brits call a “dirty weekend”. It was lovely. Cancer was paused, while we spent our days on long walks, our evenings in warm restaurants, and our nights up close in bed. We were more attentive to each other than ever before. In those reflective minutes after sex I found myself thinking about what all this meant. My conclusion was joyously crude: Nothing says “fuck cancer” like a couple that keeps on fucking. We took pleasure in each other, as the perfect riposte to this illness that came, uninvited, into our home.
Things have slowed down now. In bed at night we discuss her chemo side effects, as we count the 30 minutes between removing the day’s final medication from the fridge and injecting it into her thigh. We reflect on how the kids are getting on, and the things we’re doing to help them talk about their worries. We talk about the strangeness of another day when neither of us went to work, but we seemed to achieve so little.
Over the years we’ve occasionally watched porn together, switching phone browsers to ‘private’, exposing our innermost turn-ons to a simple search prompt. We tried that last week, feeling like naughty teenagers, but we soon got distracted by the TV, and a documentary on the band Fleetwood Mac. Yes, Fleetwood Mac. We chose the most boring band in history over sex.
And is this poison vagina thing even real? I spent some time trying to verify the claim that chemo waste can be present in the vagina, but could only find circular references and vague language, like “it is thought that…” and “it’s possible that…” So maybe it’s nonsense.
I did buy condoms, which now sit in a bedside drawer, but they’re untouched. I don’t mind. I know she likes sex with me, and the kind of sex that needs condoms, or the kind that doesn’t, isn’t ruled out, it just feels unlikely right now. We’re relating to each other in other ways, and we’re no less intimate. These days of aching bones, hot flushes, and poison vagina will pass, and our relationship will move forward once more.
About the writer
I’m a 40-something British guy, on a break from a career in technology marketing. I’m married, with a young daughter and son. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2023, and I’m here on Medium writing about this family journey in extremis…
