BB Company ad: Discharge Made Him Brush His Teeth

New BF went down on me for about four seconds... Then he got up, walked to the bathroom, and I heard him brush his teeth. gagging. We had been dating five weeks. ======== He came back to bed and put his arm around me and said something about an early start. I lay there in the dark next to a man I really liked, doing the arithmetic on the sound of an electric toothbrush. I'm 55. Divorced at 52, after 24 years. He is 38, which I had been quietly pleased about for five weeks and was now being punished for. And here is the part I need you to understand. I wasn't shocked. I'd known something was wrong for about a year. I had just never once said it out loud, to anyone, including myself. ======== Everyone warns you about the dryness. Every article, every friend, every doctor with a hand already on the door. Menopause, dryness, buy lube, goodbye. Dryness I could have coped with. Dryness is a plumbing problem and there's an aisle for it. Nobody warned me about what would start coming out of me. Some weeks it was thin and watery and barely there. Other weeks it was thick and grayish and clung, and on a warm day I could smell it through my jeans at my own desk. I had a spare pair of underwear in my purse. At 55. I'd stopped buying anything pale from the waist down. I sat on my coat at my niece's graduation. I had started showering before he arrived and again after he left, as though that had ever once worked on anything. So when a grown man got out of my bed and went to brush his teeth, he wasn't breaking news to me. He was just the first one honest enough to do it in front of me. ======== Nine days later he asked me if I'd been tested. Not cruelly. He was gentle about it, which somehow made it a hundred times worse. He said something like, look, I'm not accusing you of anything, but is there any chance you've picked something up, because I think you should maybe get checked. I said yes of course, no problem, that's sensible. Then I drove home and sat in my own driveway with the engine off for forty minutes. Because I'm 55 years old and monogamous and I had just been asked, politely, to prove I wasn't diseased. I did get tested. Everything came back clear. I sat in the parking lot afterwards holding a piece of paper that said nothing was wrong with me, feeling more insane than I had before I walked in. ======== So I went to doctors. Plural. It became a hobby. Doctor one told me the vagina is self-cleaning and asked whether I'd changed detergent. Doctor two swabbed me, found nothing she considered worth writing down, and said things shift after menopause. Doctor three asked about my stress levels. I said I was fine. I was not fine. I had recently cried in a Panera parking lot about my own underwear. Doctor four wrote me estrogen cream. $300. It helped slightly with dryness, which was the one symptom I had not come in about. Four doctors. Four appointments. Not one of them ever asked me what it actually looked like. ======== The fifth name came from a woman at my Pilates class who said, carefully, "she's good with this sort of thing." Dr. Reyes. She let me finish my entire list before she said a word. There were nine items on it. I had typed them into my phone over four months, in the bathroom, mostly at night. Then she asked me a question nobody had asked in a year. "What does it look like on a good week compared to a bad week?" I burst into tears in the chair, which was humiliating and also the biggest relief I'd had since this started. Because the question assumed I had been paying attention. It assumed I hadn't invented the whole thing. ======== Then I told her about the toothbrush. I hadn't planned to. It just came out. She didn't laugh and she didn't wince. She turned the exam table paper over and picked up a marker. "He wasn't tasting you," she said. "He was tasting your chemistry. And yours has moved." I said, moved where. "A healthy vagina sits around pH 4.0. That's acidic, and acidic is protective. Yours almost certainly isn't there anymore. When it climbs, the bacteria that produce odor become comfortable, and that changes how you smell and how you taste and what comes out of you." She said it like she was telling me the time. A year of showering. A year of it. And a woman in a cardigan explained it to me in four sentences. ======== "So I need my bacteria back." "You need three things back and the bacteria are only one of them." She drew three circles. "One. Your good bacteria hold the pH down. After menopause they die off faster than they reproduce. That's your smell and that's your gray." "Two. Hyaluronic acid is what lets tissue hold water. Millions of tiny water balloons in the wall. After menopause they pop and nothing replaces them, so on the other weeks what comes out is thin and watery, which is why you've told me it's never the same twice." "Three, and this is the one nobody mentions. Your vaginal wall is collagen tissue. When collagen production drops it goes thin. It changes how it feels and it stops holding onto anything you put in it." She circled where all three overlapped. "Most of the women I see about this after menopause are sitting in the middle. All three at once. And nearly every one of them has been told it's normal." ======== "Fix it, then." "Your fourth doctor gave you estrogen cream. It's helping the moisture slightly. It's doing nothing for your collagen and nothing for your bacteria." "One out of three is why you're still standing in front of me. Those two are the reason your boyfriend went to the bathroom." She wrote three lines on her pad. Multi collagen complex, and it must include Type V, because Type V is what vaginal tissue is built from. Hyaluronic acid, minimum 30mg. L. acidophilus, L. gasseri and L. fermentum. "One product with all three. Not three bottles. You'll be taking one of the three by March and you'll blame yourself for it." She tore the sheet off. "And don't look for it in a pharmacy. It isn't in the pharmacy." ======== I spent the whole weekend on it. Collagen with no probiotic. Probiotic with no collagen. Hyaluronic acid at 5mg, which is less a dose than a rumor of one. Then I found a Reddit thread where women type the things they'd never say to a friend's face. Dozens of comments, all circling one product. Radiancy. "Grayish to actually normal in about three weeks." "My partner said I smell like a person again and I sat on the bathroom floor and cried." "I stopped carrying the emergency underwear." I pulled up the panel. Five types of medical grade collagen, including Type V. 30mg hyaluronic acid. Her exact number. L. acidophilus. L. gasseri. L. fermentum. All three of them. Her handwriting in one hand, the label in the other, and it was the same list. ======== I added up what a year of hiding had cost me. ❌ $180 on pH washes. ❌ $220 on boric acid suppositories. ❌ $340 on a probiotic from Target. ❌ $300 on estrogen cream for the wrong symptom. ❌ $600 on four doctors. ❌ $140 on a full STI panel to prove a negative to a man I'd known nine weeks. ❌ Nearly $1,800 to be told I was normal. ✅ $49 for Radiancy. I spent more on last night's gross takeout. I ordered it in the parking lot. ======== Two capsules morning, two at night. I told him nothing. I had run out of ways to be hopeful in front of another person. Day 6: gone. The smell was gone. I checked twice, then a third time, standing in my own bathroom like a lunatic. Day 9: I noticed what I hadn't done. I hadn't changed my underwear at lunchtime all week. Day 14: it looked like nothing. Clear, slightly stretchy, entirely unremarkable. I said "oh" out loud, on my own, to nobody. Day 21: I let him. I lay there with my jaw clenched so hard my ears hurt. He did not get up. He did not get up for a very long time. Day 27: he asked me what had changed, and I said nothing, and he said it wasn't nothing. Day 34: I started it. On a Wednesday. Lights on. ======== At my follow up, Dr. Reyes tested me again. "4.1," she said. "And the tissue has thickened, which is what gives the bacteria something to hold onto." She looked at the bottle I'd brought in to show her. "That's the combination I was hoping you'd find." ======== I'm eight months in. I told him the whole thing in the end. The year of it. The four doctors. The underwear in the purse. The forty minutes in the driveway after he asked me to get tested. He was quiet for a while and then he said, "you did all of that on your own, and the only reason I ever found out is that I'm bad at pretending." Yes. That's exactly it. That's what we do. ======== Here's the part I still can't put down. It took a 38-year-old man getting out of my bed to make anyone take me seriously. Four doctors had every piece of information he had. He got there in four seconds with his eyes shut. They have engineered 37 different ways to make a man hard. They cannot tell a 55-year-old woman why she smells different, or teach her that what's in her underwear every morning is information and not a verdict on her character. They tell us it's normal, and we go home and Google it in a private tab with the brightness turned down. F*ck that. ======== The biology isn't complicated. Collagen builds the wall. Hyaluronic acid holds the water. Lactobacillus holds the pH down where the odor bacteria can't get comfortable. Menopause takes down all three. Estrogen cream addresses one. Radiancy puts all three back. No hormones. No prescription. Just the raw material your body used to make on its own, before it stopped. ======== 👉 Try Radiancy Risk Free For 90 Days: https://thebbco.com/pages/pp-radiancy-i-v2 💝 90 Day Money Back Guarantee. Use every capsule, then decide. 🌿 Hormone Free, Medically Recommended Formula 📍 Made in the USA in an FDA Registered Facility 🧬 The ONLY Formula That Rebuilds All 3 Vaginal Health Systems ⭐ Trusted by Over 3 Million Women Worldwide 🔒 No Subscriptions Unless You Choose One ======== P.S. I still have the STI results. They're in the drawer in the kitchen with the takeout menus. Every so often I take them out and look at them. A clean bill of health, and a year of my life, and not one useful word on the page. Somebody should have handed me a pH strip instead. It takes ten seconds and it costs about forty cents. 👉 Check it out here: https://thebbco.com/pages/pp-radiancy-i-v2