I suppose it’s part of growing up, realizing something that feels so good can hurt you —like piling your party plate with ice cream, chocolate rolls, and prawn crackers, and inhaling it all in mixed mush mouthfuls before you can say pass the parcel. It’s a developmental lesson, the barfing afterwards.
As we get older, exclusively adult excesses can lead to feeling ill too. In the past decade, the incidence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) has skyrocketed, and that’s particularly bad news for us women. Our biology, and the way our internal sexual organs connect, means STIs can be more serious for us than for men.
The rapid rise in STIs is largely due to a prolific increase in chlamydia, the most widespread of them all. This insidious, sometimes symptom-less, sexual nasty can linger.
And that’s the danger, because left undetected and untreated, chlamydia can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), which we absolutely don’t want. An infection that severely damages our pelvic organs, PID will leave two out of ten women infertile, three out of ten with persistent pain despite treatment. One in a one hundred can expect a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy.
Estimates suggest one million American women have PID, although it’s probably far more, as plenty don’t seek medical help. Perhaps they ignore symptoms, such as thick vaginal discharge, bleeding between periods, pain in the lower back and abdomen, sex that hurts, and possibly a slight fever. Or maybe their symptoms are so mild they don’t bother. But one thing is certain—the longer PID is left undetected, the greater harm it can do.
PID is almost always the result of an untreated STI. Between 50 to 60 percent of cases are thought to be due to chlamydia bacteria. Most of the rest are due to gonorrhoea. Although certainly not exclusively a consequence of a sexual infection (the contraceptive coil, a pregnancy termination, and childbirth are all possible—although highly unlikely—causes), PID is most often found in women under the age of twenty-five. That’s because until then, the cervix, which acts as a barrier to infection, is softer, not fully matured. Young women with multiple sexual partners are more at risk.
