Women generally shy away from talking about their vaginas and are ashamed at times to seek help when all is not well with that important organ of their body. Nicola Blenman has a plan to get women to not only know more about their vaginas but get help when needed and also holistically take care of their bodies.
“Every woman that comes to me, they are shy to talk about their vaginas. I have to come down and say ‘is wah really going on girl’ before they can actually open up about what is happening… It is such a taboo,” Blenman told Stabroek Weekend in a recent interview.
Every woman she sees who is not comfortable talking about her vagina or sexual and reproductive health in general just reaffirms to Blenman that she has work to do and she believes that with her and others working in the area in another few years Guyanese women will be more open to addressing the topic.
Blenman, who herself has experienced some of the problems women face, such as painful periods, yeast infection and a miscarriage, was on her way to becoming a lawyer when she changed the trajectory of her life to become a nutritionist, who specialises in pre and postnatal womb nutrition.
It all started as a passion for helping women and it was not expected that she would later become a nutritionist and have a business that seeks to keep women healthy. In 2019, she was completing her associate degree in law in Barbados with the intention of returning to Guyana to complete her bachelor’s in law at the University of Guyana. At that time as well, she had just lost her mother to renal failure.
Just before she returned to Guyana, Blenman said, she started thinking about doing something to help women
though she was unsure as to what triggered it. After consultation with friends, she started the Happy Flow Foundation. The foundation was aimed at assisting women who were unable to get the requisite materials and supplies needed to accommodate a safe menstrual period and also to break the taboo surrounding the menstrual cycle. However, Covid-19 came and then there was the five-month long delay in declaring the winner of the 2020 polls and the foundation was short-lived.
Around that same time, however, she had joined the Women’s Haven team brand and she reached out to the Barbados representative and that was when her passion really ballooned. Women’s Haven is a company that sells organic women’s care products, it is Caribbean-based and fully women owned. Blenman bought the franchise and intertwined it with her foundation but because it was charity work and she could not get sanitary napkins to the women in need, particularly due to the pandemic, she could not support the initiative.
However, it was after she started selling the Women’s Haven products that she realised doing more was necessary as women needed to feel comfortable, safe during their period cycles and also to get over menstrual abnormalities such as pain, headaches and nausea.
She said she also found that women were suffering from infertility “left, right and centre” and that Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) was one of the main gynaecological conditions women were experiencing followed by fibroid and endometriosis. This was the driving force behind Blenman becoming a nutritionist.
More than just the product
“I always tell women if you are going to come through my door don’t come and ask me about products. I am not going to sell you a product I am going to sell you a lifestyle change because that’s what you need,” Blenman told this newspaper in an interview.
Understanding that it was more than just the products, Blenman said, she started to offer one-on-one consultations even before she became a certified nutritionist. She sent women to get tested and once those tests showed that something was abnormal, work would start on getting it fixed.
According to Blenman, she found that nutrition is the reason why many women are not becoming pregnant when they want to and why they are suffering from PCOS. For her, there needed to be someone sitting in the gap between medical treatment and alternative medicine and that is where she fits in as she works along with doctors.
Getting to the root of the problem is key and once that is fixed then it would be no more. Because she wanted to sit in that gap, Blenman let go of law completely and did a few massage diplomas at the Caribbean Institute of Holistic Care in Barbados and in terms of nutrition she has done some courses online and is continuing to do so, including one in endocrinology.
As she continues to assist women at their most vulnerable, Blenman said, she decided to have a one-day session under the theme Women’s Wellness Workshop as she found that most women’s issue with adhering to nutrition changes is that they “just don’t know what to do. You tell a woman you need to change your diet… but they don’t know how to change their diet. They don’t know what to do. So, after speaking to countless women you realise that they really don’t know how to set their lifestyle change; to go through the process,” she shared.
As a result she has collaborated with other women, some who deal with vagina steaming and hair care among other things, and together they have created that space under Women’s Wellness where women can go to learn how to heal themselves. It is hoped that when women leave that workshop they do not need to return for assistance as they would have received everything they need. They have held about five one-day sessions last year and it was expected that another would have been held yesterday (February 19).
The women receive information on how to prepare specific meals, what not to eat when having certain conditions, herbal remedies, and feminine care among other things. The workshop is an open one and ten women are accommodated per seminar.
Survivor
Blenman believes that part of the driving force behind her work is that she is a survivor of hormonal imbalance, PCOS and miscarriage. She recently marked her one year of losing her unborn child at four months.
When she found out she was pregnant, Blenman said, while she was not sure she was ready for a child, she was happy because she would have worked through the issues that may have prevented her from becoming pregnant. At that time, her business was kicking off and she started to pull away from her clients. It took a toll on her mentally even as she considered whether she wanted to have the child.
But on February 7 when she was about four and a half months pregnant, water started to run down her legs. Initially she thought it was an infection and decided to see her doctor the following day. Later that same night she used the bathroom and when she got up she sneezed; what resulted saw her calling an ambulance and being rushed to the hospital. There, she was told that her cervix had opened prematurely, the water drained and the foetus died.
“My mother’s death didn’t hurt me that bad and I saw my mother die right before my eyes [but] it didn’t trigger such tremendous emotion. But losing that child on that day it pushed me to be more than I was at that time,” she shared candidly.
Even today, Blenman said, she still feels guilty about losing her child as she was undecided whether she really wanted the baby; she blames herself for what happened.
It was after the miscarriage that the idea for the workshop came. She recalled that the very next morning while lying on her bed, she read a message on her phone from a woman who said she just had a miscarriage and needed help to have a child.
“I think that was a breaking point but a strengthening point at the same time. I said to myself God you are using me, and you are putting me through these experiences so I can feel it, so I connect; when a woman comes to me I know how she is feeling. So, I don’t just deal with you as a client, I deal with you because I understand what you are going through,” Blenman said.
“So, all of this work that I am doing is things that I myself got myself through before I started to help other women to get through,” she said.
She has also received assistance from her father whose mother was an herbal healer and he along with his siblings has been teaching her about herbal remedies.
For her, when a client contacts her they do not connect on a client-nutritionist basis but as a friend, a sister. To really assist, she has to be in constant communication with them. “You have to understand what you have to do, and you are not going to leave my patch until you get what you came here for,” she added.
‘Raw to restoration
She also works on bringing the women to a point where they are comfortable talking about their sexual reproductive health.
“Take care of your lady part, it is so important. Good vaginal health gives good reproductive health. It eliminates infertility, it eliminates all these genealogical problems. If women would just take one single second to take care of their vaginas, things will be way better for them,” Blenman said.
Good nutrition also plays an integral role in any healing process, whether suffering mentally or physically one must be careful about what one puts in one’s mouth. If they are not careful then they would end up with a problem that requires a product. “So, before you get to the product, let’s solve the problem, which is you, and we accommodate the path towards healing,” she said.
It was on this basis that Blenman set up what she calls the Raw to Restoration programme, which helps women to heal in a holistic manner with nutrition and homeopathy. This programme also helps men.
She explained that the programme is a nutritional guide towards restoring hormone balance. Blenman does not have a physical office and as such most of her work is done on the phone. The Women’s Haven products are sold out of Tiffo’s located in the Guyana Post Office building.
She also visits women at their homes if needed but most of her work is done virtually.
Blenman believes that her programme is very easy to follow and once it is established that she can assist the individual then they are given a shopping list and they are told where they can find products at affordable prices and “we work, we work tediously to ensure we get the results that we want”.
She has seen hundreds of women over the past two years.
She hopes to open a store under the Raw to Restoration programme where people can access produce. “My intention is to bring in everything that gives healing from the head to the toe and my intention is to continuously keep workshops,” she said.
She wants women to understand that the effort they put into healing makes them heal and not the products. She maintained that diet is key as humans are what they eat. She promotes a vegetarian diet and has worked with her clients on becoming vegetarians as removing meat from one’s diet can eliminate many illnesses.
Blenman can be contacted via WhatsApp on 644-1277 and the call number is 636-0927.
