Fanny, vajayjay, kitty, muff, coochie, hoo ha, lady garden – whatever you call it, in this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share weird and wonderful tales about their vaginas.

Part 1: When Milly McDermott is 15, she finds a grapefruit-sized tumor growing out of her vagina.

Milly McDermott is a cartoonist, comedian, and show runner who has ran comedy shows in both the U.S. and in China. Milly began her comedy career after being diagnosed with a rare uterine cancer at the age of 15. She now runs comedy shows in New York City and continues to publish comic strips about her life.

Part 2: After a guy she was dating tells Dawn Harris she has two vaginas, she can’t help but wonder what is going on down there.

Dawn Harris is a theatre major from Alabama, enjoying a lucrative career in an unrelated field. She has studied storytelling at The Magnet Theater and The Story Studio. Her early years in New York were spent studying improv comedy with The People’s Improv Theatre, The Magnet Theater, and The Upright Citizen’s Brigade. Dawn has been featured on the podcasts Love Hurts and RISK! (under a mysterious pseudonym) and has told stories live with Story Collider, Awkward Teenage Years and The Armando Diaz Experience. Adam Wade highly recommends her.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

It's 2007, and I'm 15. Up until this point, I had been very socially awkward. My parents didn't allow me to listen to music or watch really trending movies or anything like that, so it was really hard for me to connect with people my own age. But I was finally 15 and things were going to change for me.

I mean, I could have friends that were older than me at this point. We would be driving cars, finally be able to listen to music. Also, I had figured out one of the secrets to attracting male attention in rural Missouri, which is long hair and hydrogen peroxide.

Milly McDermott shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in April 2024. Photo by Erica Price.

I would use the hydrogen peroxide to dye my hair because it was cheap. It really didn't matter that it was more banana yellow than it was platinum blonde. I was still becoming more socially accepted.

But I started to have a period that was five weeks long. It was really heavy, and I was doing things that was not so socially acceptable, like bleeding through my pants onto my friend's car seats and having to go to the bathroom at 10‑minute intervals because I had this urgency, like I needed to go pee, but I couldn't.

It was only a little bit later that I realized that there was something that was pressing up against my bladder. And what I realized is that if I moved it, I could relieve some of the pressure so that I could go.

Now, this should have raised red flags and I should have gone to the doctor. But at this point, my family members, me and my four brothers, we didn't really go to the doctor unless it was like a broken bone. I knew so little about female anatomy at that point that I just figured maybe this happens to everyone and maybe it'll work itself out.

At this point, though, it starts getting worse and worse. I start becoming anemic and vomiting. I throw up and the pressure from it pushes this thing outside of my vagina.

This thing, it looks like an organ. It is red with veins. It has this consistency of like a wet eraser. The thing is is that I don't want to tell anyone, because at this point I think I'm growing a penis, which was very taboo at the time. Also, if this is a penis, let me take advantage of this. Like, what's it like to get paid 10 more cents on the dollar?

So I'm pulling on it and I'm not feeling pain, just sort of a pulling sensation in maybe my stomach. I pull so hard that I eventually break a piece off. I'm like, “Okay, this is definitely not a penis,” because that would have ended me. I mean, psychologically, who am I without a dick? am I going to be heard at family functions?

I finally cave and I tell my mom. I'm like, “Mom, look what I found today.” She looks at it, has no idea and we go to a gynecologist.

The gynecologist doesn't do a vaginal exam. She just hears my symptoms and says, “Well, maybe it'll be better after a week. Maybe you can get your mind off of it and go on vacation.”

So I went on what can only be described as the worst camping trip of my entire life. So, I am unzipping and re‑zipping the tent throughout the night, trying to go to the porta potty and nothing is coming out.

I switch over to the van, because I don't want to wake anybody up, and the van has no ventilation. So I open it up and, immediately, mosquitoes come, coming into the car, buzzing in my ear. I am sticky and I am bleeding and I am hot. I don't know what's happening and the mosquitoes are making me feel like I am a dead thing. I feel like roadkill.

So, we go to the ER the next day. It turns out, I have a tumor the size of a grapefruit growing from my uterus down through my cervix and out my vagina, a tumor called intrauterine embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, which, like, side note, I feel like it's a really cool name and this cancer doesn't get enough representation. I feel like it all goes to breast cancer, and that's fine.

Like, I saw this one guy who had a three‑dimensional boob on the back of his phone case one time. I looked at him and he goes, “Oh, Breast Cancer Awareness.”

I was like, “I don't know if I'm going to be on board with that.” I feel like I'm only going to be on board with that when somebody has a vaginal tumor on the back of their phone, and they go, “Oh, Intrauterine Embryonal Rhabdomyosarcoma Awareness.” That'll be the only time.

So, I'm in the hospital bed and they gave me an epidural, so I'm paralyzed from the waist down. Their goal was to use chemo to shrink the tumor so that they could eventually operate. So I'm lying there with my legs apart and this mass hanging out of me.

I don't know if you guys have ever— you could probably imagine. Tumors don't smell that great. So I had this can of Febreze that I would spray on my lower body every 20 minutes. I will never like the scent of Fresh Linen ever again.

Also, side note, okay, somebody recently, they have Febreze trash bags now. I'm on the fence about that. There was one of my friends who was using Fresh Linen trash bags, and I didn't know that. My scent association just went straight to, "Okay, somebody is hiding something dark in their genitals."

Then once I found out what it was, I was like, "Oh, no, that was just me. That was just me."

Anyways, I thought I was going to die. But you know what? I kind of came to terms with it. I was so bad at school. My school really focused mostly on Math, Science, and History. Those weren't really the things that I was great at. I was moreso theater and art related.

So when I found out my diagnosis, I was like, "You know what? I'm going to concentrate on the things that matter: scrapbooking and watching daytime television.”

But I'm so sick at this point, I don't want to do any of it. Like watching, walking anywhere, all of it just made me super motion sick. All I wanted to do was sleep.

But my Director of Humanities at the hospital, Jill Turek, did not want to see that happen. One day, she asked me, “Hey, will you be the keynote speaker at this Friends of Kids with Cancer Fashion Event?”

And so I get to be at the Ritz Carlton. This is the fanciest building I've ever been in my entire life at this point. There's chandeliers, a giant ballroom, floral carpet, 200 guests, $100 plates. I don't even know if the walls were gold, but in my memory it was gold.

They go on stage and they introduce me, and they say, “This is Milly. She's 16 and she's very brave.”

I go on stage and I tell them everything that I have told you up until this point. They laugh and they connect and they cry. I had this moment while I was on stage where I was like, “This is what I want to do.”

I get done and the compliments were wild. They're like, “Milly, you're so beautiful. You're so talented.” These are the compliments I had died to hear beforehand. Here I was trying to fit in at school, trying my best, and all I needed to do was die a little bit? I would have had no idea.

So I get to do multiple cancer‑speaking events after that. I'm falling in love with public speaking.

A year‑and‑a‑half goes by and I finally have my last chemo treatment. It's a shot of Vincristine, and I go home. I ask my mom if I could take the car out. And while I'm driving at night, I just start bawling. I think, “Who am I without cancer? Is anybody going to want to listen to me on stage now that I'm not dying?”

But with the shedding of identity comes a birth of something else. I've now been 15 years cancer‑free and I still have so much I want to talk about. I make comic books and I do stand‑up comedy, and people are still listening and laughing. I have so much love around me.

I reflect on that time and why people really gravitated towards me during that time more than any time prior. I realize it's because I didn't have the energy or the time to be anything I wasn't. It was through the ability to just be unmasked, essentially.

And so I reflect on it and now I know that it doesn't take bleach blonde hair or a vaginal tumor for people to see your light. All you got to be is yourself.

Thank you.

Part 2

There are some things in life that once you hear them, you can't unhear them. For me, that was when a guy I was dating told me, "I think you have two vaginas."

I had my doubts that he really knew what was going on down there for a number of reasons, but it freaked me out enough that I decided to do a little self -exploration to see if he was right. When I felt something unexpected, I decided I was going to ask some major questions at my next pap smear.

If you ever want to see a gynecologist’s jaw hit the floor, ask them if you have two vaginas. She picked her jaw up, did the exam, and, now, you might be surprised to hear this, but she said I did not have two vaginas

Dawn Harris shares her story at QED in Queens, NY in March 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

But if it wasn't too vaginas, what was it? Because it really felt like there were two pathways down there, like two roads diverged in a pinkish wood. And I always had to use two tampons, one to the right and one to the left. So, throughout the years, I would ask other gynecologists, and they would all say no.

No other partners I ever had ever found anything different. And it was just so embarrassing to keep asking about it, that I stopped, but I kept wondering.

Fast forward to 2015. I start dating the man that is now my husband, Brian. When we started talking about marriage, I knew I had to tell him I wasn't totally sure about having kids. I thought that there was something physically wrong with me. I had really crazy, irregular cycles and I didn't know if I wanted to have kids. It wasn't a core need of mine.

So I told him about that and he was like, “Well, it scares me too,” so we got engaged. It wasn't a deal breaker.

We got engaged in October 2019, so our October 2020 wedding would have to be postponed. Throughout the pandemic, through suddenly having to move to a new apartment because our landlord sold the building, through four wedding postponements, through me losing my job, and through losing our wedding venue one month before the wedding, I just thought to myself, if the world comes crashing down, the only place I want to be in the entire world is by Brian's side. I felt that I was terrified of doing this on my own but I have Brian who I believe would be an amazing father.

So I asked him, “Should we maybe just try this so we never regret not trying?” And he said okay.

But we didn't want to do it right after our vows. I mean, it was really stressful getting this wedding off the ground. We just wanted to enjoy being married for a little while. I was 38 on our wedding day, though, almost 39.

And then, whoops, one day I turned 40. I'm like, “Maybe we should start trying.” Fertility drops off after the age 35, so the clock had been ticking.

Our decision‑making process over figuring out if we wanted to become parents consisted of just like, “Ahh, I have no clue what we want to do. This is so scary. What if we get divorced? What if we have no money? What if the kid has like a terrible disease? Ahh!”

And then our couples therapist was like, “Well, it sounds like you have the idea of what parenthood is like.”

I think to myself, “We're driving ourselves nuts when it might not even be possible anyway, so let's get some fertility testing just to be sure.”

I made an appointment at the NYU Fertility Center and, in my first appointment, they're doing a transvaginal ultrasound. The doctor takes a look at my ovaries, says they look nice and healthy. I've got plenty of eggs.* And then he takes a look at my uterus and stops cold.

He says, "Okay, this is your uterus, and you see this line down the middle? That's a uterine septum. Did you know about this?”

My eyes bulged out of my head and I go, “Oh, my God, do I have two vaginas?”

He's like, “So this is your uterus…”

And I'm like, “No, no, no. I know it sounds stupid, but you don't understand. I've always thought that there's something wrong down there. It's like two roads and I always have to use two tampons, one to the right, one to the left. I really think I might have two vaginas. Can you please, please, please check?"

And he's like, "Okay."

So he feels around down there for like a minute and then he tells me, "No.”

I don't have two vaginas. What I had is called a complete septate uterus with a longitudinal vaginal septum.

Allow me to get a little pedantic. What that is, is a congenital anomaly. When anybody with a female reproductive system is developing, those organs start as two tubes called Mullerian ducts. They should grow and grow and expand, and when they begin touching, their shared wall of tissue should dissolve and become one unit. It's like two bubbles hitting and becoming one big bubble.

That just never happened for me. And there's no known reason why. I personally believe it's because I have such extreme ADHD that I never finished the very first project I ever started.

And here's the bad news. There are lots of other types of congenital anomalies and mine is the one with the highest rate of pregnancy failure. So, if we want any shot at having a kid, I'm going to have to have surgery. Just from my gut, I just said, “Yes, sign me up.” They scheduled me for a few months down the road.

I left that appointment feeling so amazed and frustrated because I asked I‑can't‑tell‑you‑how‑many gynecologists if I had two vaginas, and they all said no. So how did they never catch it?

Apparently, what happens is, in a routine exam, if they put in the speculum, it just moves the septum over to the side, so they would see what looked like a normal vagina, and just tell their friends about me later.

So we have the surgery. It goes very well. I have to heal for two months. I can't have sex or use tampons or go swimming. It was really non‑invasive. I was very surprised. It was super easy.

So our next step will be doing an IVF procedure because I'm, you know, 40‑ish and that's going to be our best bet, even though it still is only about a 20% chance.

So count me extraordinarily shocked when, three months after the surgery, four home pregnancy tests and one blood test confirmed that I was pregnant.

I called my doctor and I'm like, “Dude…” and he's like, “Whoa. I did not I did not think that was going to happen.”

And I was like, “No shit.” I had the grimmest predictions possible.

He told me, “Congrats. Your hormone levels, though, they look a little low so come back in 48 hours and we'll take another blood test.”

I was amazed. I was like, “Did I just save myself $30,000 in IVF?”

For Brian and I, it was like we were shocked and amazed, but we weren't terrified. And so I'm thinking, “I'm going to do this. I am going to do whatever it takes to protect this little life growing inside me.”

And I did my very best for two whole days. Unfortunately, the second blood test confirmed that the pregnancy was over and we were back to square one. It just happens sometimes and nobody always knows why.

Before the surgery, Brian and I had planned a late season trip to Montauk. I had been picturing walking down the beach, hand in hand, picking out baby names. Instead, it was cold and gray. Hurricane Lee was passing off in the Atlantic, heading towards Maine, and it caused a huge swell. The waves were so much more powerful than I'd ever seen them before, and we couldn't swim.

One morning, I'm on the balcony, and I'm watching these surfers. They were out there taking the opportunity. And there's this one guy who's just trying and failing and trying and failing over and over again and again to catch a wave. At long last, he caught one. He jumped up and he put out his arms and he took a nice long ride.

From where I was standing. I knew that must have been the most amazing feeling in the entire world.

Thank you.

*Dawn misspoke and would like to amend that you cannot see eggs on that type of sonogram. She meant to say something like “The doctor takes a look at my ovaries and says they look nice and healthy and everything is in working order.”