Tag: contraceptive

  • Peaks and Falls #Periodically 22

    Peaks and Falls #Periodically 22

    You might have noticed in my last #Periodically that I wasn’t feeling too hot about my time on the pill so far. I’m happy to report that things are going much better, but this second pill pack hasn’t been without its fiascos. Before anyone gets scared, don’t worry, I do not plan on documenting every pill pack ever, cycle by cycle, but during the adjustment phase and partly for personal record, I want to document the changes I experience during the first three months.

    The Second Pill Pack

    I won’t lie, the start of this cycle and my first withdrawal bleed on the pill didn’t catch me at my most mentally stable. For moments, and I mean brief seconds, I repeatedly convinced myself that I was about to drop dead, which I’m sure you can appreciate, isn’t very nice. My PMS is undeniably worse on the pill and unusually for me this bout extended well into my period.

    After early signs suggesting the pill was going to improve my skin, this cycle proved that that is not the case, it has in fact got worse. It’s a bummer but acne is something I am well-used to dealing with, and I’ll take it over pain any day. A more positive facial change (this one feels like TMI but hey, sharing is caring) is that my “beard” has vanished without a trace. I say beard and mean like four hairs but it was one of the reasons my doctors suspected I had PCOS way back when. Now that it’s gone, I can only deduce that whatever was causing it was hormonal.

    My period itself was exactly the same except it was two days shorter. I guess that’s nice but it was the two good days at the end that were cut off so if we could switch the off-days around that’d be ace. As my period ended and I began to think about starting the next pack, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of normality that I was certain was because I had been off the pill for six days. I even began to get my writing groove back, so taking the pill again felt like I was poisoning myself. But I did, and once I started I wrote in my diary “feeling slightly better about the pill but not actually any better – confusing feeling” – I’ll say!

    So a few things, like my face, began to settle into new normal realities on the pill. My weight is up and my hair is being weird but my motivation and creativity didn’t slump like it did last month which I am so grateful for. In fact writing-wise, March has been a bit of a boom. I’ve started reviewing plays for AYoungerTheatre.com and I had an amazing response to the article about the Always Period Poverty campaign I wrote for Harpy. You can read it here. I’ve even had a couple of moments where I’ve tracked “euphoria” and “clarity” on Clue – there were a few days and mornings where I just felt really damn good for inexplicable reasons.

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    On reflection, these peaks might have been because the mood swings began. Maybe I missed that phase of puberty but I do not remember my mood ever swinging so literally. My sister was staying with us and wanted to have a bath and mentioned that she had scuffed-up my book (The Cows, come on Sally!) and I just flipped. I was sitting in a different room but my blood felt like molten lava and I wanted to hit something. Five minutes later I wanted to cry and another quarter of an hour later I was laughing at something and then it all happened again. I’ve always had grumpy days and sad days and happy days, but to swing so violently from mood to mood is new for me. When it finally settles I’m just left sitting on my bed like I’ve been bitten by a magical creature going “what’s happening to me?!” I was hoping this was just a phase too but they’re still rearing their heads regularly, so that’s a thing I’m trying to navigate.

    By this point I had finished three months on iron tablets and had a blood test to see if my anaemia was gone now. When I called to get the results, expecting the all-clear, I was told I needed to see my GP. “Piss it, what now?,” I thought. Disturbed by the mood swings, thoughts of spontaneous death and occasional “growing” pains in my legs I was looking forward to speaking to a doctor the next day. But then when I woke up, I couldn’t move. It was so bad that the first thing I remember thinking was “is today the day my ovary finally takes me to hospital?” Something in my right side had been bothering me all week, but on this particular morning it was stabbing me every time I so much as wiggled a toe. I called the doctor as planned and got an appointment with yet another new doc, this time a female Dr P. When I got there she told me that my iron levels were fine (yay no more horrible iron tablets!) but that she was worried by how much pain I was in. Given that it was my right side it was important to rule out appendicitis, which she did swiftly since I didn’t have a temperature. After she felt my belly up and read my file, she expressed concern that either a cyst on my ovary or the ovary itself, had “torted” – twisted.

    Not greatly comforted by that prognosis I sat while Dr P called the hospital and arranged for me to go straight to Gynaecology Emergency Unit (GEU). As my dad drove me I had a look through the files she had sent me with and took pictures of them – for the first time I was actually made privy to the inner goings on of my body and my doctors’ conversations – a rare treat. We got to the understandably rather scary and sad place that is the GEU and I was seen by a nurse who took my vitals, a gynaecologist who did a pelvic exam and another nurse who did some tests. Typically, by now whatever the pain was it had peaked and eased off and the gynae reasonably came to the conclusion that I was not at any great risk of emergency. The pelvic exam hurt, but not as much as it would have if a cyst or ovary had been twisted. She sent me home with an obscene amount of co-codamol and an appointment for an ultrasound in a few days.

    By the time the scan arrived I was feeling a lot better, without any help for the co-codamol which I didn’t take. I was relieved to be having the scan though because I was going skiing at the end of the week and was growing increasingly worried that if I fell over I was going to burst a cyst. Before I went to the scan I wrote my expectations on a post-it to make the inevitable easier to process. The post-it says “there will not be anything there. Good and healthy. Looks normal. No change”. I was right. The sonographer was really helpful and speculated that it was possible the sudden increase and then complete drop in pain I’d experienced was caused by a cyst rupturing or going away. The gynaecologist I then saw in the GEU afterwards was not as supportive or helpful. As far as she was aware, and I understand she had very little to go on, there were no cysts or any other indicator of a gynaecological problem, and so there was nothing a gynaecologist could do. I think the fact I still have an open case with my regular gynae made her words easier to swallow because even though she was saying ‘”nil gynae” case closed’, I knew the case was far from closed. I was once again told “that’s life,” “we rarely get to the root of these problems” and “try your bowels” – just like after the surgery. It was all horribly familiar but I took it much better this time. My mum was irritated by it too and fought it more than I did – thanks mum!

    Anyway, I was happy to have confirmation of a cyst-free uterus for the beginning of our mini ski break. I was nervous about it (as were insurance companies who took more money than normal, ugh) because about a year ago I stopped running as it was aggravating my pain. Since I refuse to pay to exercise when running is free, this has meant I’ve done nothing more than hiking and walking in the last ten months. If a cyst didn’t interrupt our ski trip, a heart attack might… I am so happy to say that three days of skiing were accompanied by absolutely no uterine or fitness induced pain – all injuries were purely skiing and ski-boot related!

    When I returned home an amalgamation of PMS, sciatica and post-holiday blues left me feeling pretty glum. Yet when I look back on March and the second round of the pill, I actually feel really hopeful. I’m working on the basis that I’m cyst-free for now because the pill is working. My pain levels haven’t come down drastically but there is a small improvement, and I’m confident it’s going to get even better. Now that I know I can ski I’m also filled with the hope that I can start running again soon, or doing something at least, because the pill/croissant combo has done nothing for me on the scales… Plus, if it does all get better on the pill then it will prove that the cause is gynaecological –  that would be a really satisfying up-yours to the doctors who have said “nil gynae”. I just hope that if the pill is the solution, that I can get a grip on these mood swings soon.

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    Hilary – 1, Ovaries – 0 (Ski boots – 2)
  • A tale of two pills #Periodically 8

    A tale of two pills #Periodically 8

    This post is a long time coming. I could’ve written it over a year ago, before my uterus was even giving me gip. I’ve hesitated because I think it’s a dangerous subject. There is no doubt that hormonal contraception has offered billions of females around the world more control over their bodies than our predecessors could have ever hoped for. When women are free to decide when they have children, equality is a little a closer to reach. Sex and pregnancy no longer hold the weight, threat and disruption they once did and for that we must be incredibly grateful for all the benefits hormonal contraception offers human kind.

    However, yep, there it is. However, it seems hormonal contraception is only just beginning to show what else it is capable of, either that or people taking it are only just starting to talk about it. For most people, hormonal contraception works really well. Problems with it are usually very individual and I don’t think we’re told enough what signs to look for to know if it’s working with us or against us. So here’s my story. It’s not a story intended to put anyone off of hormonal contraception, it’s just a story about a couple of things that happened to happen to me. 

    I went on the pill in summer 2013. I was put on Rigevidon, a combined oral contraceptive pill. I did notice at the time that I was the only one of my friends on this pink packaged pill, they were all on Microgynon (the green one). It was great. I had a monthly bleed MONTHLY for the first time in my life, I could skip a period if I wanted to and my acne improved. Plus it was contraception, all excellent things in my book.

    In April 2014, I went to my university health centre to get a new prescription of Rigevidon, simple stuff. Unlike my doctors at home when I had first got the pill, the nurse at the UHC weighed me, took my blood pressure and asked me some questions. When she asked ‘have you had any migraines?’ I said no and then yes. I had had my first ever migraine a few weeks ago, and my second shortly after. I remembered it well because I took some ibuprofen as I had a headache, but then when it didn’t go away I left my friends playing Mario Kart to go and lie down in my dark room. It got better with sleep, I told the nurse. She frowned, and then asked ‘have you had any leg or chest pain?’ I laughed, funny she should ask. My flatmates and I had been on Web MD last week, diagnosing me with a pulmonary embolism because of growing pain like leg aches and occasional sharp chest pain, all in good humour though.

    “Right, I’m afraid I can’t give you Rigevidon,” she said. Shit. I hadn’t realised then the gravity my answers to the questions had held. I was expressing many of the symptoms of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), often associated with Rigevidon and other contraceptive pills. She thought about putting me on some other combined pills that contained higher levels of oestrogen but my great aunt and my dad both had breast cancer at the time, she didn’t recommend increasing my risk of that if it was already coming from both my maternal and paternal genealogy.

    So she decided that I should go on Cerelle, a progesterone only pill – POP, also known as the mini pill. I had a lot of questions about POP but she just told me to expect my periods to get a little funky, to take it everyday with no off week and be on my way. This is the part of the story where I usually say, ‘here’s where shit got fucked up’. But actually Rigevidon had already messed with my body more than it should’ve been allowed to, if they had asked me more questions at the very beginning they would have learnt that both my mum and sister were taken off of pills for signs of DVT – that alone should have been reason enough for it never to have gone near me. Since then, most of my friends on Microgynon (I’ve never heard a complain about micro) have been switched to Rigevidon and I’ve seen increasing forum discussions and articles about people being switched and confronting DVT when they do. Now call me a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t help but wonder if Rigevidon is much cheaper than Microgynon and that the NHS has decided that Rigevidon is more affordable, regardless of the risks it so clearly poses to some people. #ToryBritain

    So I prepared for my periods to get funky, and boy did they. In the first eight weeks I had six separate periods. Fun. After that, I didn’t bleed for over a year. I got used to it at first and it seemed fine but as time went on it was like PMS was beginning to accumulate. 2014 was a pretty bad time for me anyway, but I felt like something was pushing me to miserable. What didn’t help was that my acne got worse, I put on weight and bloated in all the best places, my face, my boobs and my stomach.

    There was something else too. Something that is most definitely TMI, an overshare. But given how often I see it appear as a concern for fellow Clue Ambassadors, I’m saying, once again, to hell with TMI. POP took away my ability to self lubricate. At the time I was in a fast declining relationship, and I took it as a sign that I was no longer attracted to my then boyfriend. That might have been a part truth but I didn’t realise the full effect POP had had on my body until I stopped taking it. Crying to my nurse I begged her to give me a reason to come off. Cruelly, she said ‘there’s no reason. You don’t need to have a period’. It was in her interest to keep as many female students on the pill so the UHC didn’t have to deal with student pregnancies, I appreciate that. But like I explained to her, I was getting more and more hormonal by the day. I felt like I had been pre-menstrual for eight months, I needed some release.

    She said no on two occasions but on the third I just decided to stop taking the pill one day on holiday. A month later I started to bleed and then I had a year of sheer irregularity and then discovered that something else in my reproductive system had floated up shit creek. But I remember coming off of POP vividly. I dropped two cup sizes almost immediately, my face dropped something too. And then, I discovered myself once again having the ability to self lubricate. I had ended the relationship by this point but it was clear to me that this was happening due to a total shift in my hormones. What’s more, now this could have just been the euphoria of coming off of POP talking, but I remember thinking that I was smelling smells that I hadn’t smelt since I was 17, before I was on the pill. I have no idea if that’s a thing, but it was to me.

    So now I’m off the pill and fortunately my inability to have, or at least to enjoy, sex is acting as a pretty sturdy contraceptive. I did enquire about getting an IUD but surprise, surprise my cervix is in the wrong place so I can’t. It’s likely that whether I have endometriosis or not, Dr M will suggest I go back on the pill. Whatever pill he suggests, I will deal with that decision at the time. I find it quite a traumatising prospect, having to go back on, but it might be my only option for the time being.