MRKH syndrome: 'The day I discovered I was born without a vagina'

                                                                                       JULIAN PETER

A routine question from her doctor about menstruation set Kenyan Julian Peter, now 29, down a path that led her to discover she was born without a womb, cervix or a vagina. Twelve years on she shared her story with the BBC's Anne Ngugi.

I was born with a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH), where you have no womb or vagina, and you can also find yourself with just one kidney.
A woman who has MRKH can never get periods.
I don't have a uterus, so I've never had periods. This is the normal that I know, I don't feel bad about it.
People have different feelings about who I am.

'They can say whatever they want'

Someone told me that I should go somewhere to be prayed for.
Another person said that because I come from Ukambani [a region that is stereotypically linked to witchcraft] then my grandmother had something to do with this.
They can say whatever they want to but what really matters is how I take it. If I were to listen to them it would start affecting me, and I would start thinking that what they were saying was true.
I discovered I had the syndrome when I was a 17-year-old school student.
I went to hospital as I had problem with my legs, which were swollen. The first thing the doctor asked me was when I last had my period. I had never had one.

Julian Peter

I cried on the first day and the second day and the third, but then I moved on... my priority was to get back to school"

Julian Peter

They did a scan. The first image indicated that my reproductive tract was closed from the outside.
I went through an operation to open it, which was not successful.
I had another scan that showed I had no uterus or vagina, and that was when I was diagnosed with MRKH.
I cried on the first day and the second day and the third, but then I moved on. I was only 17 and quite small, so my priority was to get back to school.
I was in hospital with my mother, my only parent, and the diagnosis shocked her. I think as a parent there were questions she was bound to ask herself, Essentially she was wondering if she had done something wrong.

'I didn't want the operation'

As I had studied biology, I understood what the doctor was saying that first time.
I told her that I didn't want to go through with an operation at that point as I wanted to go back to school to complete my education.
Ten years later, I went back to hospital and had a successful operation.
The type of MRKH that I had meant that I had no vagina, no womb and I only have one kidney. My vaginal canal was not there and it had to be created.
My life is normal as MRKH does not interfere with how I want to live. But for some it is emotionally disturbing and people might need to go to a psychologist to accept the condition.
When you realise the implications of the condition that you have, you have to forget about giving birth to children.