Sharon Tierney, a 45-year-old woman from Sydney, felt like a designer tie just wasn't enough for her husband Mike's birthday this year, so she upped her gift game — to vagina art.
She got the idea from a popular British comedy talk show. "I was watching The Graham Norton Show and saw a lady that produced vagina art for a living. She literally painted the fleshy parts of her vagina and squished it onto art paper," she told Daily Mail Australia. Thinking that the project sounded fun and easy enough (and not at all like a possibly bad idea), Tierney headed off to the arts supply store with her friend Kate for paint. Little did she know this errand would land her in the hospital with an enormous cyst in just a few days' time.
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"Within a couple of days I had a cyst the size of a golf ball, it felt like I'd been horse riding for a week — I couldn't put my legs together," Tierney told the Daily Mail. After four trips to the doctor, she ended up in the hospital with a cyst in her Bartholin’s glands, which are located at the entrance to her vagina. The cyst formed because the paint had blocked a duct in the glands, and over time, fluid gets backed up creating an abyss. When it gets as large as Tierney's did, the only solution is surgery to drain it, and strong antibiotics to keep the cyst from coming back.
Sounds like a pretty significant punishment for an ill-planned birthday present, right? While this is an extreme case, it's far from the only thing that can happen to you if you attempt something similar for your sig-o's birthday, or any old day where you feel like getting creative. You could also get a whole host of bacterial infections ranging from a simple yeast infection to a massive foreign body infection that results in permanent scarring.
Symptoms of vaginal foreign body trauma are no laughing matter. It usually starts with itching and vaginal discharge, and can end up causing sepsis, especially if you make putting foreign things up and around there a regular thing. The chronic form of vagina foreign body can lead to loss of bladder control and disrupted bowel function. If the foreign body is large, it can obstruct urination altogether and even perforate the vagina, which can cause systemic problems.
The scariest part is you could forget something (or part of something) is up there, which can create even more problems because it makes it that much harder to actually retrieve the object (or objects).
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In the end, Tierney's husband was far more concerned about his wife than his birthday gift, which is the sign of a genuinely loving marriage. I hope he also appreciates that it's better to have a creative wife who messes up sometimes, than a boring one.