Intimate makeover

One gynecological surgeon told her she "had the vagina of a 50-year-old woman," and sent her home with orders to do more Kegels, a pelvic-squeezing exercise long recommended to reestablish vaginal tone after childbirth. Another suggested corrective surgery and the implantation of a pessary, a supporting device that would hold her uterus and other organs in place and prevent them from intruding into the vagina. But the physician cautioned that convalescence would be long and insisted Katie stop breast-feeding so that the weakened surface of her vagina would hold sutures. A third recommended a hysterectomy, which would have plunged Sokey into early menopause.

Sokey felt the options that obstetrics and gynecology had offered her ranged from ineffective to frighteningly radical. Her physical problems and the demands of motherhood were taking a toll on intimacy, even as her marriage, she discovered, was coming apart.

Sokey says she was overwhelmed with "the despair of going forth in the world of singlehood feeling broken and used up, and there was nothing I could do about it ... I felt very old."

When a friend suggested she go to Matlock, Sokey felt a twinge of hope. "It seemed overall like a gentler procedure," she says, and Matlock's staff assured her they had sent women in her situation home repaired, happy and hopeful. She went for Matlock's trademarked Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation package, an $8,000 procedure in which Matlock uses lasers and layers of sutures to make incisions along the front and back of vaginal walls, stitch the urinary bladder and rectum in place, remove excess tissue and tighten the vaginal opening.

Today, Sokey says she feels, simply, "rejuvenated." When she blew up a balloon for her son recently, she did not have to brace against the bottoming-out feeling. Her labia have returned to normal, making her choice of underpants a fashion decision again. And as she makes the first tentative steps back into single life, she says, "sex has been great." Matlock says his colleagues in the obstetrics and gynecology specialties have treated women -- and patients such as Sokey -- shabbily. He says he is listening to them and giving them options that many desperately want.

"If these were male problems, [the medical profession] would have looked at these symptoms and solved them long ago," Matlock says. His patients, he says, are voting with their feet -- and their pocketbooks because virtually none of the services he provides is paid for by insurance. "They all have gynecologists, but they're coming to me."