“I studied vaginas for a couple years in college” – One of my favorite validation lines to use. It brings about reactions of confusion or interest, and not much in between.

But it’s true.

Yes, it’s true. I’m writing about vaginas. Or, more specifically, some experiences and learnings to promote female health…. sprinkled with some humor.

Isn’t it funny that when someone is being wimpy, sort of pathetic, weak, or some other negative connotation they often get called “pussy”? This cracks me up.

Most people incorrectly refer to the whole of a woman’s nether region as a vagina or pussy. Let me tell you – they are not weak, wimpy, sad, or pathetic. Those tough little guys get penetrated, clean themselves, prevent disease, and birth babies. Do you have any idea the transformation that happens when passing a baby?! It’s insanity! And they go back to there usual self after a while. Hell, with a couple stitches, sometimes even smaller. So, the derogatory term ‘pussy’ makes me chuckle every time I hear it. Anywho, that’s beside the point.

Our senior year of college at U. of Cincinnati in the Biomedical Engineering Department (BME) was the first year that they offered a research track for a senior project – as opposed to a device design track. The department gave us a list of 15, or so, different devices and topics for us to list the top 5 in the order of our interest.

I was the only one to list the research track of female pelvic floor disorders.

Before penning the topic on my sheet, I thought, “my mom has had like 10 kids, she could prolly use some help down there”, not knowing anything about where the direction of the research would go. Sorry, ma, but it’s true!

So my entire senior year, and at least a year and a half after that, I worked closely with a couple PhD students, our researching professor mentors, and a few others (all funded by grants and Fortune 50 companies) to study pelvic floor disorders. I’ll lay out what I can in the papers below for those interested, but I won’t get too much into it past a quick summary at the end of storytime.

Just kidding!

Heres a quick summary: Women, especially after having several children and especially as they get into their 40s have a huge likelihood of getting incontinence and/or prolapse – meaning they can’t hold their piss/shit in and their insides start to fall out through their holes. Pretty wild. So, we built an algorithm that took ultrasound images of deforming soft tissues to determine strains that the tissues would go through. On top of that, we invented fake tissue that mimicked human soft tissue both acoustically and mechanically; so, sound (ultrasound) and moving (think coughing) similarities. We’d then take ultrasound images of the tissues deforming, calculate the strains, and report on findings so that companies could use that data to make some female health products that are more efficient than vaginal meshes (which are almost worthless, or at least were).

One day we bolted over to the medical lab on the East Campus hoping to be able to ‘harvest’ some ‘specimens’ of a ‘deceased geriatric’. In American, we ‘went to see if we could use a dead old lady’s lady bits for science before some other science nerd got to her’. We were too late and someone had chopped off her leg, so the PhD student I was working with went over to see if we could still accomplish what we were there for.

She walked over to the dead 80-ish-year-old, very dead, very cold woman who was missing her right leg a third of the way down from her hip, and pushed on her abdomen. As she did that, a little bubble of blood kind of popped out of her and a gust of internal cavity air, that smelled worse than you think it would, smacked me square in the face. I immediately stood up, puked a little in my mouth, said I’d see her later, and left for the day thinking about how I’d be able to tell this story forever. So here it is.

The next day the PhD student brought in the vagina bits she had cut out of the dead lady and I worked with them for quite a while running as many tests as we could get out of them. It had definitely changed me though – there was no coming back.

Takeaways before I dump a bunch of research jargon below:

Ladies and Gents, (Ladies, if you want to have stronger orgasms and more frequently, and keep your piss and shit and organs inside your body after having kids and aging) (Guys, if you want to have more orgasm control and stronger ones)

DO

YOUR

KEGELS

Heres a link to some decent female exercises.

For guys, click here.

IT’S NOT A JOKE

Here are some links to the research:

DESIGN HISTORY FILE, JKK

JKK Validation of bssma by comparing imaging modalities with an in-vivo model of the pubovisceral

FORMAL PAPER