#progressblog

[vagi-no-mus19-blog]

Just a bit of background...

I'm 22, have vaginismus and I am in the process of being nearly painless with dialators. 

I always felt like I had something wrong with my downstairs area, especially ever since I had endless UTIs and kidney infections as a child (which I am pretty sure contributed heavily to my condition. I could never insert a tampon, and when I did attempt to it stung and burnt and only went up part way before hitting THE WALL. I used to absolutely freak out when trying: my mouth would go dry, my heart would race, and always seemed to end up in tears. I thought it would all work out when I'd lose my virginity. Pretty sure that's how most vaginismus stories have started out. 

Fast forward to age 21: I had my first EVER boyfriend. I'd been late on the bf front, being in an all girl’s school and later university classes with mainly all girls too. I had never found that special someone that everyone else seemed to find so easily. It made me feel awful about myself but really circumstances were just unfortunate. 

Anyway, my first boyfriend was sweet and absolutely charming to begin with, but later became passive aggressive about sex and distant. I wanted to take things slow, and he did not (atleast physically). Looking back he was so sexually frustrated because he wasn't getting what he Wanted from me. And to quote him ‘I. always get what I want’ - well HA you didn't get any from me luv. 

Thankfully we broke up. But when we were together he took any opportunity he could to get physical in some way. And whenever he lay so much as a finger at my entrance it was so bloody painful and I didn't know why. It worried me at the time so I went to the doctors to get sorted believing it was my hymen causing the pain. Well it was not. 

Two gyne appointments later and I had been thrown in the midst of vaginismus. Something I felt was absolutely hopeless and incurable. My confidence was at an all time low. But as I came to realise from routing deep around the Internet, there ARE success stories and quite a darn lot of them. So my story began after my second private appointment in mid September. 

[shaysgoals]

23 lbs down.... lots more to go.

[skchambers7-blog]

Progress Blog 10 : Reflection

Throughout the course of this semester, this class has allowed me to maintain a better grasp on interconnected literacy between different cultures. It has taught me that literacy has a much bigger role in everyday life than I ever would have guessed, and it has given me insight into what a fandom can do for spreading literacy and how the individuals of a fandom can adapt their own sense of literacy practices in the way they interact with one another on the site. The forum of comments on each fandom’s accounts are my favorite area of research. The way the fans interact with each other and the artwork they create represents literacy events and contributes to the growth of the fandom as a whole. I really liked studying the way in which the fans encouraged each other to excel in the fandom, especially when they post a fan work and others show them appreciation for it. I like that the class has given me a bigger interest for discourse communities and how small or large groups of individuals can come together to create literacy.

[shaysgoals]

On my wedding day... Have lost weight since then!

[shaysgoals]

Me :D

[tburt1302]

Progress Blog 5: Unit 3

These three assigned readings were a bit complicated for myself to read as they were long and drawn out. The assigned readings were uninteresting most of the time and it was hard to force myself to read them. In the first assigned reading, Shannon Carter talks about mainly communities and then that of her brothers communities. She first describes what a community is and then uses her brother as an example of communities and the requirement. In the second assigned reading, Seth Kahn appeals to students thoughts as he talks of ethnographic writing, what it is and why we as students need to write one. In the third assigned reading, Tabetha Adkins talks about interviewing a group of members from an Amish community and how she got to know them, their values, their community, and how impacting it was to create the relationships she had with the members of the community.

[tburt1302]

Progress Blog 3: Unit 2

When this unit started, we had to comment in a group discussion board and plan our meetings with our assigned group to work on our project. However when the date came and passed to message in the board, no one else from my group had messaged. I was worried that I would fail the assignment without a group until the professor emailed the class and people started talking on the board. We had planned to meet on Thursday in the library and get a study room. It took us a while to figure out who was in our group but when we did it seemed like we clicked immediately. On this first day we had quickly gotten started as one person had already had an ethnography to do the group project over. We had split up all the slides we had to do and read as we worked. We asked questions to each other and managed to get most of our project done that day. Planning to meet on Friday to finish everything and turn the project in.

[tburt1302]

Progress Blog 4: Unit 2

When we met on Friday, we finished our presentation and had everyone go over each slide and make sure nothing looked wrong and suggest things we thought might be changed to sound better. Although because the instructions did not explicitly say that we needed to record our voices over the presentation for each slide, my group believed we did not need to record our voices for a “Voice Thread”. I am worried that we did have to record our voices because the thread was called a “VOICE” thread and we may be docked a lot of points without it but it was a group decision and the decision was to not record our voices. Writing the reflection essay will be easy as it will just be over the assignments and the page requirement is only one to two pages. I feel as though I could make a proper ethnographic study after reading over the one our group chose.