I went to sleep that night in the hospital feeling sick and frustrated. I also hadn’t been able to keep any food down and I couldn’t sleep either.
Every two to three hours, a nurse would check my blood pressure, do a blood test and take my temperature. I also had a catheter attached, which was extremely uncomfortable.
The next day in hospital, I spoke to a gynaecologist and told her I never want to have sex again. She laughed and said this isn’t how sex was supposed to be. ‘When you’re ready, it’ll be so much better,’ she assured me. I felt wary but nodded anyway.
It is important for young women to understand that first time sex is definitely not meant to be inherently painful and not everyone bleeds
I ended up staying in the hospital for two nights, and the bleeding finally stopped the day after I was admitted—sometime after lunch, after my body had already been through more than it knew how to handle. I remember feeling weak, disoriented, and honestly, a little disconnected from everything around me. It didn’t feel real. One moment I had been trying to convince myself that what I was experiencing was “normal,” and the next I was lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by quiet urgency, nurses moving in and out, and the kind of silence that makes you realize something wasn’t right from the beginning.
That night, they removed the gauze. It’s hard to explain just how painful that moment was—it felt almost as intense as when it had been put in. There was a sharp, lingering discomfort that stayed with me even after it was over, like my body hadn’t yet caught up with everything it had gone through. I felt exposed, physically and emotionally, but I didn’t really know how to process it. I just wanted to go home.
The next day, I was discharged.
But going home wasn’t as simple as it should have been.
