Halle Berry was forced to do her own research when her doctor mistook her perimenopause symptoms for herpes.

The actress, 58, appeared on this morning’s episode of The Drew Barrymore Show to hold a conversation with host Drew Barrymore about menopause.

Berry met her boyfriend Van Hunt when she was 54. She described their time together as the best and mentioned that she had found her perfect match. However, their relationship faced an early challenge when she experienced difficulty using the bathroom one morning.

“I tried to go to the bathroom and I couldn’t go,” she said. “It was so painful when I tried to let a little bit out. I couldn’t go. It took me almost 10 minutes just to empty my bladder because it was so painful.”

“Substances were down there that I had never seen before,” she continued. “And I thought, ‘What is this?’”

Hunt eventually drove Berry to the doctor because her downstairs was “so swollen [she] couldn’t even put [her] legs together to drive.” Once the doctor finished the examination, he diagnosed her with a “really bad case of herpes,” which sparked some questions between her and her new boyfriend.

“We spend the next 72 hours doing the blame game, trying to figure out who gave it to me, who gave it to him,” Berry said. “And then a couple of hours after that, my doctor called me and said, ‘You do not have herpes.’”

The doctor’s mistake was a “defining moment” for Berry, who began to do her own research after the misdiagnosis.

“That’s when I came up with dry vagina syndrome that women have when they’re in perimenopause. And I had all the symptoms of what that felt like and I realized, ‘Oh, I’m 54 years old,’” she said, adding that “nobody” had ever had a “serious conversation” with her about perimenopause, which is described by the Cleveland Clinic as the “transitional period before menopause” that can start as early as your mid-30s.

The Drew Barrymore Show airs on weekdays on CBS. You can check the website for local airtimes.