“Cancer can impact sexual health in a multitude of ways: physically, mentally, emotionally,” says Teresa Weissend, MS, PA-C, a physician assistant at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. As a result, women who are suffering complications and side effects in their sexual health due to cancer might have lots of questions they’re not sure who to ask. Roswell Park now has a sexual health clinic to help women who have been treated for any type of cancer receive support and guidance for their complications. Roswell Park also has a pelvic floor physical therapist to help strengthen pelvic floor muscles that can become weakened during cancer treatments.
My name is Teresa Wean. I am a physician assistant at the Gynecology Clinic here at Roswell Park. Cancer can impact sexual health in a multitude of ways, physically, emotionally, mentally. Here at our clinic, we are hoping to create a comprehensive care plan for all patients um to take care of every single aspect that it affects patients who have undergone cancer treatment. Whether it's in regards to chemotherapy, radiation therapy, a lot of people can have either vaginal dryness, vaginal irritation, decreased libido, they can have urinary symptoms, they can be put into early menopause. All of these things are things that we unfortunately see following cancer treatment that not a lot of people talk about or discuss, but we are here to hopefully bridge that following their treatment to make sure that all of their symptoms are being treated at Roswell Park. We are starting the sexual health clinic at the Gyn Clinic. This is for all of our female patients who have undergone any type of cancer treatment, whether it's regards to chemotherapy, immunotherapy radiation therapy surgery. We are here to do um comprehensive physical exams, discussions and treatment planning to make sure that are being taken care of and your symptoms are being treated in a way that works for you for our male patients. We do have a urology clinic here at Roswell. That would be more than happy to take care of any questions or concerns that you have regarding your sexual health. To give a real world example of one of the patients that we have seen recently. I will hand it off to my colleague, Ashley Sing to explain. Hi, I'm Ashley Singh and I'm one of the nurse practitioners in the Gyn Clinic at Roswell Park. Recently, in the sexual health clinic, we saw a patient who was diagnosed with breast cancer over 10 years ago, who has been suffering from side effects of her chemotherapy in relation to her sexual health. Her providers in the breast medicine clinic referred her to our office for help with her vaginal dryness, her loss of libido and other menopausal symptoms. After doing a comprehensive physical exam, we were able to give her vaginal moisturizers including hyaluronic acid and the use of vaginal dilators to try to help the initial management of her symptoms. We then saw her in follow up and she has reported that she is more comfortable when she is trying to have intimacy with her husband. We will continue to follow her for any future needs that she has regarding her sexual health. In addition to seeing these patients in the sexual health clinic, we also can refer them to our pelvic floor physical therapist to help and strengthen the pelvic floor muscles that generally become weakened during cancer treatments. This is one of the benefits of being a patient at Roswell Park as pelvic floor physical therapy is not a service that is offered widely in the community and we have one right here. Our sexual health clinic is one of the many services that we are proud to offer and hope to expand, to improve the care for all of our patients who walk through our door. In addition to the treatment that we provide for sexual health symptoms, there are a multitude of other services that we provide here at Roswell, our pelvic floor physical therapists, um our psychology teams, we also have an onco fertility group here. If we are having fertility issues prior to or during any type of cancer treatments that we can refer to, we are excited to take care of all of your patients regardless of cancer type. If you have any questions about the services that we provide at the sexual health clinic, please call our office.
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