A student who is allergic to sex says she’s left in excruciating pain after getting hot and steamy.
Chloe Lowery, 18, says oral sex turns her face so numb she looks like she’s been injected with anaesthetic at the dentist.
She’s been told by a doctor that the pain is caused by a “hypersensitivity to sperm,” and she says her skin turned red the first time she touched it – but she thought little of the rash.
However, after another sexual encounter left her face “drooping,” Chloe says she’s had to stay away from oral sex.
Chloe, from Colorado in the US, recalled: “It was on the right side of my face, it was droopy and I just couldn’t express emotion at least with my mouth. It kind of felt like when you get a numbing shot at the dentist in your gums.
“I honestly laughed it off, I thought it was more funny than anything. I was afraid it was going to be permanent but I slowly got my feeling back so I was fine but I’ve avoided it since for good reason.”
After a trip to the doctor, the 18-year-old says her suspicions were confirmed – she had a seminal plasma hypersensitivity, which is a rare allergic reaction to the proteins found in most men’s sperm.
Her allergy means she gets a painful “burning” sensation down below for an hour after sex that she describes as feeling like “a million acupuncture needles.”
Chloe, who studies English at university, is learning how to live with her rare condition – but says many people she tells about it have never heard of it.
She now says she has to prepare for sex by having a wee beforehand, but sometimes that doesn’t help and she’ll still have to put ice on her private parts afterwards.
Chloe also practises safe sex and uses condoms – which appears to have stopped her severe allergic reactions for now.https://get-latest.convrse.
She said: “I have to disclose it to partners like ‘by the way, there’s certain things I can’t do because of what I have’ and nobody has seemed to mind. They think that it’s actually more interesting or funny than anything, so it hasn’t caused me any relationship issues.
“People actually want to know more but of course they don’t want to do their own research, so they ask me for all the details.”
She added that while she doesn’t think her condition is “super common” she reckons more people have it than are letting on.
“I just think people mistake it for other things or have more minor reactions than me and so again they think nothing of it,” she said.
“People just don’t even believe it’s a thing because it’s so uncommon or at least it’s not spoken about, so they’re more intrigued than anything.
“Once I describe my experience they believe me, but at first a lot of the time people are like ‘no way, that’s a real thing?’ and then they go ‘oh, that sucks’ and I’m just like ‘it doesn’t, I live with it, there’s worse things out there’.”