Karen Wilson was 16 when she first began feeling the pain. It began out of the blue one day, and it never stopped. She could never figure out why the heavy feeling in her vagina was happening, or how to stop it. Some days the pain was so bad that she couldn’t walk or even get out of bed. Wilson began going to doctors, but none of them knew what the pain was or how to make it stop. Many people told her it would end after she had children, and one doctor suggested that it was psychosomatic. It wasn’t until her 20s that Wilson was diagnosed with a mysterious condition known as vulvodynia.