While sitting in the waiting room, trying to hold myself together, I managed to message my best friend. I didn’t even fully explain what had happened—I just told her I needed her. By the time I was taken into a ward for more serious assessment, she had already arrived. Seeing her there brought a small sense of relief in an otherwise overwhelming situation.
When I arrived at A&E, about an hour and a half after the bleeding had first started, everything felt surreal. I was seen by two gynaecologists and several nurses—every one of them women, which made me feel slightly more at ease. Still, the constant movement of staff, the clinical environment, and the seriousness in their voices made it clear that this wasn’t something minor. One of the doctors told me that if the bleeding didn’t stop by the next day, I might need surgery. Hearing that word—surgery—made everything feel even more real and frightening.
After examining me using a cystoscope, one of them explained what had happened. “You have a tear on both your vaginal walls,” she said calmly. She explained that it could have been caused by penetration that was too rough, or because I wasn’t physically ready—meaning I wasn’t properly aroused or relaxed. That explanation stayed with me. It made me realize how little I had understood about my own body and what it actually needs to feel safe and comfortable.
To control the bleeding, they decided to use gauze packing. By that point, I had been bleeding for over three hours and had soaked through more than ten sanitary pads—even doubling them up didn’t help. Oddly enough, despite all of that, not a single drop had stained my jeans. It felt almost absurd, like my body was going through chaos while the outside still looked normal.
One of the nurses helped me change into disposable, maternity-style briefs. As I sat there on the hospital bed, I noticed the red and black silk lace thong I had bought especially for that night. It felt almost ironic—something I had associated with confidence and excitement now just looked meaningless, even ridiculous. I remember thinking how useless it had all been in the end.
Emotionally, I was all over the place. I felt panic, shock, embarrassment, frustration—and at moments, even a strange sense of dark humor about the situation. It didn’t feel real. It didn’t feel like something that should have happened to me.
At one point, I told a nurse again that I didn’t want my parents to know. That fear came from years of hearing my mother’s warnings echo in my head. Growing up in a South Asian household, sex had always been treated as something forbidden, something shameful. My mother would tell me, in Bangla, that men only say what they need to say to get what they want. That they make promises they don’t intend to keep. That once they get sex, they leave.
Lying there in that hospital bed, I couldn’t help but think about those words. Not necessarily because they were entirely true, but because of how deeply they had shaped my fears and my understanding of relationships.
