Sex is supposed to be a pleasurable experience rather than painful, so Halle Berry knew she had to do something when intercourse began to feel like ‘razor blades’ for her.
Little did the actress know, looking for a solution to her intimate problem would lead to her injecting new life into her wellness company, Respin, and launching her own lubricant.
The Catwoman star, 58, has now spoken out about her health journey and how it impacted her relationship with her boyfriend of more than four years, singer and music producer Van Hunt.
Although she now hopes to help women across the globe who are going through a similar experience, Berry faced quite the battle when it came to finding out why sex had become so excruciating for her.
“When I was 54, I had just met Van,” Berry said. “I manifested this man, and we were having the best time. I finally met my person. It was amazing. It really, truly was amazing.
“One morning, I tried to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t go. It was so painful when I tried to let a little bit out, I couldn’t go. I had to squeeze it.
“It took me almost 10 minutes to just empty my bladder because it was so painful. Substances were down there that I had never seen before and I thought, ‘What is this?'”
Berry went to get checked out by her doctor, who left her stunned when he informed her that she appeared to have a ‘really bad case of herpes’.
Recalling her experience, the X-Men actress explained that her vagina had become ‘so swollen’ that she wasn’t capable of driving, so Hunt had chauffeured her to the appointment.
“We spent the next 72 hours doing the blame game, trying to figure out who gave it to me, who gave it to him,” Berry told Barrymore. “And then a couple of hours after that, my doctor called me and said: ‘You do not have herpes’.
“I was like, ‘Okay then, what is it?’ And this was the defining moment for me, he said, ‘I don’t know, that’s what it looked like’.”
The misdiagnosis and her doctor’s lapse in knowledge encouraged Berry to head on her own ‘reconnaissance’ and research mission.
This led her to finding out about dry vagina syndrome, which is one of the many symptoms of menopause.
It turns out that Berry was in perimenopause, which refers to the time during which a woman’s body makes the transition to menopause.
She said: “I had all the symptoms of what that felt like and I realised, ‘Oh, I’m 54 years old.’ I learned that perimenopause can start in your late 30s even and early 40s.”
