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The dreaded retained tampon

Shieva Ghofrany: [00:00:00] Okay, this one is like kind of gross and funny. So just warning right now, anyone who does not want to hear about vaginas in period, which I'm pretty sure is like none of you cuz y'all like that stuff. Um, and gross stinkiness. Turn this off cuz it's about a retained tampon preface with, I'm wearing a hat cuz my hair is crazy today and I'm gonna trim it myself later and maybe even bleach it tonight after some kids' basketball games. 

So you just don't wanna see underneath. Um, okay, so yesterday a delightful patient who's also a friend who said, you have to post about this. I, I'm not gonna say her name, but I don't think she'd even care. Um, she complained of, so this is a very common. 40 something year old has really, really, um, weird periods, irregularities for the last couple weeks. 

Long story short, in her particular case, we had done a couple of things as a workup to make sure there was nothing else going on, but for what I had deemed was perimenopausal bleeding. When she came in yesterday for a follow-up, she mentioned something about the smell and how [00:01:00] there had been a terrible smell for a couple of weeks with brown discharge, which is like ding, ding, ding alarm bells to a gynecologist, not an a. 

Bad, dangerous way, but in a, like, I know what that is kind of way. Um, and I said to her, I then she said, the smell stopped. And I had said, I don't remember you telling me there was an odor. And she said, no, no, no. I did look at the text, which ps to you, I have not looked at the text, but I believe you had. 

She said that in a way that I remembered it, which is why texts are not great. I would've said, is there a tampon in there? But by the way, she would've responded with, hell no. There ain't no tampon, which is exactly how she responded yesterday along with every other woman who comes into my office saying. 

Oh my God, it smells like something died. And when I say, oh, do you think there could be a tampon? Um, their response is always some version of absolutely not like emphatic. I mean, I've had women of all ages, um, anywhere from literally like 19 to 51 where I really remember being convinced by this one woman that [00:02:00] she had a rotting tumor in her vagina cuz she said it had been months. 

And I was the first gynecologist she had seen in so long and I thought, oh my God, she's literally dying of cancer. Something's rotting out of her vagina. And I look just like every other patient when this happens, you put in the speculum and the doctor says, oh, there it is. So for any of you who this has happened to, which I would imagine is many of you, the worst smell on Earth is possibly the retained tampon. 

Because the tampon sits in your vagina, it absorbs the blood, the string somehow gets stuck up in there, and then old blood smells. Nothing other than a dead animal. That is the only way to describe it. So when patients say to us as gynecologist, oh my God, it smells like something died. We think retained tampon. 

So you guys might remember, and if you don't scroll back to one of my videos about the three smells there is the, oh my god, it's fishy, which is bv. I'm gonna talk more about that a lot cuz now there's actually this novel new, um, pill that I have found and discovered that someone came to me [00:03:00] with that's called vaginal lactose. 

That um, I really hope we can. Um, traction on in America cuz they don't actually sell it. And it's tremendous and natural and amazing. So that's the fishy odor. We'll talk about that later. There's the not so fresh end of the day as I joke, just like my armpit not so fresh by the end of the day because. 

There's bacteria and sweat and you're not supposed to wear deodorant in your vagina. So it's not so fresh. We have to accept it. It is the way it is. And then there's the telltale. Holy cow, something died. And that's always old blood. So sometimes that comes along with like right after the baby, the little parts at the end of a couple weeks where you have that brown. 

Um, Amber yellow colored Lok. It's called After the Baby, and that is still old blood. It smells and at the end of your period, that brown sticky, tacky stuff, old blood, it smells but the like, oh my God, horrible smell. Smells like something died. Common. Other things people will say is, every time I have sex, this disgusting odor is released. 

I know it sounds so gross, but it happens all the time you guys, and when patients come [00:04:00] in, the funniest part is how adamant every patient is that it is not a tampon. So my trick when the tampon, when I find it, I literally, if I suspect it, my staff knows, bring me this special little instrument that just helps me pull it out. 

It does not hurt to pull it out, but the doctor puts in the speculum, they see it. I pull it out. Hi guys. One sec. Pull it out. I put it right into a glove, take off my glove, not up the glove. Put it right into the garbage. And I tell patients, guys, quiet for. This is gonna smell like something died. So just know that. 

And then I encourage them to go home and never douche, but just really kind of copiously. Rinse your vagina with water and at the most, something mild like dove soap. If you feel the need to rinse it further, you could take a squirt bottle. With a little bit of baking soda and water and just gently irrigate it, but you are not educe, you're not gonna scour it. 

The likelihood of toxic shock is incredibly low. I actually just looked it up because I've never seen toxic shock in 21 years, and the incidence is one in 100,000 people per year. Okay, so [00:05:00] in 2016, which was the last year that I saw published statistics, 800 women had it. That's like nothing. So again, the likelihood of toxic shock is so small. 

But I usually say, you know, when you, when you've discovered it, if you found it on your own, there's no harm in going to the doctor just to get cultures. Cuz often the flora will be thrown off and you'll get yeast or bacteria. But if you take it out, you find it yourself, or your partner finds it and they take it out, you feel fine. 

You do not need to go to the gy. Okay. Retained tampon, totally gross. Animal smelled died, but it's funny and it happens all the time, so don't be embarrassed. Okay, bye.