This Routine Gyno Procedure Could Mean You Never Orgasm Again

Thousands of women undergo LEEPs every year without being informed of a potentially devastating result: the loss of their ability to enjoy sex. Cosmo investigates why doctors aren’t taking this side effect more seriously.

- Hannah Smothers

When she tries to remember the feeling, she thinks of Drew*, a grad student with golden hair she dated in her mid-20s. Drew liked to touch the spot where her legs met her butt—and she loved to let him. She was so hypersexual that sometimes just tilting her hips into him, even fully clothed, could trigger that intense pulse-pulse-pulse deep inside her. That wild flurry of contractions that felt like every cell in her body was lighting up and regenerating. It felt, she thought, like magic.

Then it was August 2010. Her gyno was brusque, businesslike. Sasha* entered the room with cold fluorescent lights and put her feet in the stirrups. She was a little nervous, but the doctor had said that a loop electrosurgical excisional procedure, or LEEP, would rid her cervix of the irregular cells that had been detected by her recent Pap smear and some follow-up tests. Thanks to a shot of anesthesia, Sasha felt nothing as a small heated wire was inserted into her vagina. The whole thing was over in minutes.

Walking home afterward, she had a hazy premonition that something was wrong, but she brushed it off—even when, for days, it almost felt like there was a part missing inside her body, a kind of hole where something important used to be.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that a nice-looking guy approached Sasha at a bar. On their third date, she brought him back to her place. They were making out, entangled on her bed, when she tilted her hips into him—and nothing happened.

Confused, Sasha tried again, crunching her body against his, searching for the tingle that had often signaled the early sensations of orgasm. Instead, “I felt nothing,” she recalls. She continued going through the motions, but her mind was elsewhere, working itself into a panic over the numbness in her pelvis.