Tampons provide a whole lot of comfort and convenience. They get rid of the feeling of wearing a diaper and allow for a wider range of motion when you’re having your period. But right around the same time many of us receive our first tampons, we also learn that they have to be used responsibly.
Tampons can cause some pain or discomfort if not inserted properly, and more seriously they can cause toxic shock syndrome if you leave them inside your body for too long. One woman shared the story of leaving her tampon in for not a few hours, days, or weeks, but for two whole years, and she lived to tell the tale.
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As a teen, the woman started experiencing severe pain.
Author Melanie Galeaz told this incredible story on TikTok to raise awareness about toxic shock syndrome. Galeaz explained that when she was a teen she started experiencing pain and strange gynecological symptoms, the New York Post reported. But doctors assumed she was suffering from Lyme disease. “When I was little, I got bitten by a deer tick and had all the symptoms of Lyme disease,” she said in the original clip.
At 14, the teen was scared to speak honestly about her gynecological symptoms.
“I started getting all these pains in my body,” Galeaz said. “And some really gross stuff was happening down south.”
Galeaz avoided speaking about the gynecological stuff. She was 14, embarrassed, and didn’t think her doctor had the best bedside manner.
“The doctor was really disregarding me and he was being mean and scary,” she said. She took the Lyme disease medication and was feeling better, but the gynecological issues were not improving.
Two years later, her gynecologist gasped when she finally discovered the issue.
Galeaz tried to ignore her symptoms, but after two years, she couldn’t do it any longer.
“I finally go to the doctor again and I went to the gyno. She cranked me open, looks and she gasps.”
Galeaz said to the doctor, “Well, that’s not what you want to hear.”
That’s when the doctor told her, “You have a tampon stuck horizontally under your cervix.”
Now, Galeaz doesn't believe she ever had Lyme disease.
She said removing the tampon after two years was painful because it was dissolving inside her. “It kept breaking apart and it was such an unpleasant experience,” she recounted.
Now, in hindsight, she doesn’t believe she ever had Lyme disease and that the tampon being in place too long caused all of her symptoms. Naturally, people had follow-up questions, such as if Melanie had an odor from the foreign substance in her body for so long.
“I come from a family that absolutely would have destroyed me if it smelled bad. It didn’t,” she responded. “At times, it did smell bad, and I was very sad thinking that I just smelled like that naturally, so I figured out ways to mask it.”
The two-year-tampon mistake is not even the end of all this.
The story actually gets a little crazier because this wasn’t the only time Galeaz had lost a tampon in her vagina. During that same two-year-period when she took one tampon out, another followed. So there was a time when three tampons were in her body simultaneously.
“I have no idea how long that one was in for. So I had one in me for two years, one in me for an unknown amount of time, and one in for about eight hours,” she said, according to the Post.
Wild.
We’re glad Galeaz survived this potentially fatal ordeal. If we were in her shoes, we might be using an alternative, less-invasive method to deal with menstruation at this point.
