My novel proceeds at a pace that would make me despair if I wasn’t musing over how to write a Wild West fairytale flashback character without channeling Clint Eastwood.
Meanwhile, I have just come off the rag, so to speak. I think that since I’ve made a habit of writing about anything that comes my way that’s related to my body, this is a fine topic for today.
I find the way that women’s periods are talked about a bit strange. There’s the usual influx of euphemisms, but I’d like to set those aside for the moment. What I find strange about mentioning that I’m on/near/capable of having my period is the look of bemused bewilderment that such a comment will usually pull out of my male friends.
I realize that it’s entirely fair for these friends of mine to feel bewildered when confronted with the mention of an experience which half the population finds alien. But then, I’m still surprised every time; menstruation is such a routine, usual part of my life.
And yet, this routine is rife with physical and mental issues. Issues I rarely talk about, or even think about, even when I’m on my period. That’s weird. I love thinking about things.
So, I think I’ll explore a little, maybe shed some insight on this bodily function that takes up one of every four weeks of my life.
Here is a breakdown of what happens to my body every month.
My period usually begins in the first week of the month, and when I was on the pill (which I was for four years) its regularity was so mind-numbingly predictable that I also knew it would come, each month, on a Wednesday afternoon. Now that I’m almost two years off the pill it is only slightly less regular. I’ve never experienced the change in cycle that can come when women who live together sync their periods up. If this happened with my mother and I, I never found out. When I lived with two of my best girlfriends, senior year, I was still on the pill. They synced to me. I was like a drumbeat.
I recently started taking more drastic steps toward getting rid of the acne that lives (lived, I hope) on my chin. I find it unfair that I have acne at the age of 24; I realize that many of us continue to have acne our entire lives, but this does not prevent me from feeling as though I’m still in middle school every time a new whitehead comes swimming up to the surface.
This acne has always behaved in predictable cycles. A week before my period it threatens, and then will usually flare up two days before I start bleeding. Since I came off birth control I’ve learned that I can predict the arrival of my period through watching my skin. Now, however, I’m two days past my period, and I have just gotten my first pimple in two weeks. This is mildly confusing to me, and I’m sure my skin is confused as well.
My period begins with a bit of dark red-brown spotting, nothing too alarming. Within four hours it increases to a steady flow, and by the middle of the next day is usually heavy enough that I’ll bleed through a heavy-duty tampon in about an hour. (That’s very quickly, by the way.) This tapers off steadily over the next three days; by the third night I will be able to sleep eight hours without having to get up to insert a new tampon. Usually my body gets a bit coy at this point and stops bleeding for about 12 hours, or just long enough for me to start thinking it might be over. Then, once I’ve let my guard down, it comes rushing back in for a day in a final hurrah.
I started using tampons when I was a freshman in high school, and they practically changed my life. I hated pads so, so much. They never worked, I would always bleed through them, and sometimes I’d end up with horrible patches of blood on the insides (or outsides) of my clothes. I avoided tampons for a while because the mechanics of them spooked me, but after borrowing one from a friend’s mother in a desperate last-ditch effort one summer day, I learned by necessity and never looked back.
My periods mean a few things to me, in both physical and mental aspects. These are the issues that continually crop up.
The first day of my period means I may be in for a very bad couple of days.
Usually my cramps are mild to moderate. They are deep belly pains, not quite like muscle pains, and they make me feel shitty. Sometimes this is literal. I described this feeling, once, as “being two steps away from having my stomach fall out of my butt.” But this cramping, although annoying, is manageable. It is uncomfortable rather than truly painful.
About once every four months, however, I have what I call a bad period. These are the periods that kick off with a little trickle of cramping pain and culminate, a day later, in sweat-soaked twisting misery. My entire lower half ties in knots, cramps that start at the middle of my spine and end in my knees. There is nausea, and a lot of blood. Since I never know just when one of my bad periods will be, when the first spotting comes I start mentally steeling myself for this possibility. Sometimes I take Advil. Usually it’s too late.
The first time this happened I was in high school. I curled up on the bed in our guest room and moaned, my arms wrapped around my waist. It was the first time I’d ever been in serious pain that wouldn’t stop or fade away. It lasted about three hours. My dad brought me saltines and told me it probably wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.
When I was on the pill these bad periods were very rare. Since I came off they’re more frequent, and much worse. The worst one was about a year ago. I called out sick that day. I remember I was curled up on my bathroom floor in an over-sized bath towel because the texture of cloth of the sheets on the bed made me feel sicker when it touched my skin. I rocked back and forth slowly and cried. In the worst of it I held my head over the toilet and vomited violently. Vomiting made the cramps fade, and I fell asleep on the floor, still wrapped in my towel.
That’s what it means to me when my period comes.
What else?
The first day of my period means I’m not pregnant.
That seems like something that I, as a woman who knows safe sex and doesn’t even have that much sex, should not have to worry about. And yet, I lived in fear of an unwanted pregnancy for a very long time. An irrational fear, but a real one. Thankfully, this has eased, because I’m better now at analyzing irrational fears.
Where I grew up, pregnancy at a young age was like a brand on your skin. It meant you had to leave school, you had smashed up your future and ruined your life. And to my family (and by extension me), “at a young age” didn’t just mean the middle school and high school years. It meant during college, after college, any time in my life before I was at least 27, and married. I got it drilled into me that anything resembling a commitment as large as a child before I had had a career and made a great deal of money would be seen as a betrayal of my genes and potential.
The very first time my first boyfriend and I slept together, the second man I’d had sex with and the seventh time I’d had sex, the condom broke. I remember his face when he pulled the little ring of latex from his penis where it had rolled itself up tight. We had been dating for six days. I was on the pill. I had missed one of my doses, the week before.
Needless to say I did not get pregnant. I simply lived in abject terror for about a week and a half, until my period came and I blessed that oozing blood flow like a fucking ceremonial cleansing rain.
I don’t think that the fear of pregnancy that I nursed for so long had much to do with the development of my kink in orgasm control, but I know that it helped me to kink on not giving out sex when I still lived with that baby stab of terror in my belly.
What else?
My period means that I’m not sexy.
Now, I don’t tend to get extremely bitchy or significantly bloated during my period, two side effects I’ve been happy to miss out on. However, my sex drive plunges. It practically free-falls. I don’t feel turned on, I usually think I look horrid, I lose interest in sex, pornography and eroticism, and I simply wait. I know that I could probably find plenty of people willing to nose-dive or cock-dive into me while bloody, but I don’t usually see the point. I find my blood interesting, especially when it’s gobby and thick, but I don’t find it sexy. That, and the nerves of my clitoris essentially shut down for a week.
But then, after my period has had its last hurrah and is permanently removed from my life for a good three weeks, my sex drive rockets upward. I become demandingly, unquenchably horny. I get in the habit of multiple orgasms, I walk around with my nipples hard, I go looking for new dirty stories to read and write. I sometimes growl during sex. It’s quite fun.
And then, after a week or so I settle back down, I get back into a groove, I don’t need sex every minute, and life goes on, until the next month comes.
And remarkably, although I’ve been doing this every month of my life for the last eleven years, I have never written any of this down before today.
28 Comments
This was interesting to read. One of my embarrassing secrets is that I can’t wear tampons. I mean, I can if I really have to, but putting them in makes me queasy and I am never comfortable while wearing one.
Although I am a man, I feel compelled. I have been saying this for some time, and have never gotten a poor reaction from it.
If I ever ran for politics, I would do it on the platform that mensturation is a medical condition, and as such all necessary materials should be covered by healthcare and paid leave should be guaranteed. When this culture is civilized, this will happen.
Oh periods!
Mine decided to fuck with me, and it changed its start day.
The nuvaring comes out on Friday. (Today, actually!) I used to begin bleeding on Monday night. Then, all of a sudden, my vagina said “Nah….lets wait for TUESDAY!”
On the upside, Tuesday is a good day for it. New House and Law and Order SVU’s are on, so I have something to watch while I’m cramping.
But those first two months really fucked with me, coz the boyfriend and I used to have the no condom sex.
We switched back to yes condom sex for a while.
If you want to giggle about your vagblood, check this out.
http://naamah-darling.livejournal.com/66235.html
It gets a negative reaction from me on a few small fronts. Just FYI.
I agree Dev.
While I appreciate the thought Alexis, I don’t like to think of my period as a medical condition. While it would be nice for Empire to pay for my tampons and a few pairs of period panties, I don’t think I’d like paid sick leave just because blood is coming out of my cunt. That kind of says “I’m a girl, and blood coming out of my cunt makes me fragile and unable to work, so please treat me differently because of that.”
Yeah, sometimes I get real sick during my period and have horrible nasty icky cramps, but thats rare, and 98% of the time I’m able to go to work/school/whatever, and get by with a bit of chocolate or salt. Depending.
My period is lots of things to me. Its a ‘hey, your not pregnant!’ when I’m nervous. Its an icky thing sometimes that can be uncomfortable. (Sometimes, when dealing with a blood shy male, its annoying, but hey, I don’t always need oral! Extra lubrication! Lets throw down a towel and fuck!)
But its also a beautiful thing that the human body does ever 28 days or so, and I also look at is as a symbol of my woman hood.
But then again, I’m one of those crazy pagan chicks. At one time, I had arranged my period so that I bled during the Dark Moon. In my teen years, I was sometimes known to refer to it as my ‘moon time’. But that was just from too many readings of “The Mists of Avalon”
I’m also totally for menstrual art. But thats another topic.
Yeah, I think the medicalisation of periods does sound rather worryingly like making not being like men an abnormality. I’d rather see condoms made free than panty pads.
Mine are no trouble, painless and over in 3 days. Heavy and very messy, but I am crazy enough to like that filthy drama. They make me tired and sadistic. But, well, me becoming more of a lazy sadist is hardly news.
Bitchy, in NYC, you can get free condoms by the (massive) box. I have a friend who has something like 200 NYC condoms.
The plus side to going back to college, for me, was that when they have the free condom table, I tend to show up and grab as many as I can until they yell at me.
You can get free condoms from sexual health clinics in the UK too. I find I usually don’t need to ask, just get given a paper bagful on my way out. I’ve always given them to my teenage brother.
Fascinating post - I’ve not had a period for almost two years (the IUS is a wonderful thing) and I’ve kinda forgotten what it’s like to be waiting for it, to be prepared to deal with all the ups and downs and mess. Having read this I remember all the fluctuations of lust, mood, weight, chocolate intake - no major mountains or valleys, just little regular differences, and then blood. These days those same things go up and down, but without any underlying drumbeat.
As for Alexis’s suggestion, I’d be against seeing someone who was menstruating as inherently ‘ill’ or ‘unhealthy’, but I do feel that any woman who wants to stop menstruating should be able to do so, whether or not her periods are painful or debilitating. It’s so easily done, so why not just let everyone have the choice? (As is, the option exists but is hidden among contraceptive options rather than being presented purely as a matter of choice). I mean, why give sick leave to those with painful periods when they might, MIGHT, want to just quit bleeding?
Alexis, I also appreciate the thought (or the sympathy, rather), but would hate to ever hear anything like that truly said or meant. I hate crap like men making snide jokes about how a woman can’t be president because what decisions would she make once a month? It’s just a way of making women look weak. Yeah, it sucks when the cramps are bad - I’m lucky that mine aren’t too bad, but I’ve had those days when I had to call in sick with awful cramps once or twice in my life. That’s what sick days are for.
Anyway, great timing with this post, Eileen, as I’m just finishing up my period. Your story about your early periods and the products you used back then reminded me of my own story of the first time I used a tampon. I was 13, and my mom was coaching me from outside the door on how to get it in. I said, “It won’t fit!” and my mom said, “Honey, a man’s penis can fit in there, I’m sure a tampon will fit.” Up until this point, neither of my parents had had the “sex talk” with me. and my friends never spoke about it. This was the first time I ever truly put two and two together about how sex happened.
Anyway, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but: why did you go off the pill? It sounds like there were many benefits for you: vastly reducing pregnancy scares, reducing period acne, shorter, lighter periods. (Which are all the reasons that I am on the pill, by the way.) Obviously I won’t be offended if you don’t want to answer.
As has been mentioned, medical leave for women on their periods is called sick and/or personal days, and if anyone is going to run for office on that platform then I hope they are seen as sexist, because that’s what that is; men have hormonal cycles, too. Instead, why not just run on a platform of making a higher minimum of sick/personal days a standard employment prerequisite?
The cycle as always is good to know
My periods have started getting worse in the last year or so. I suspect it’s age (am coming up on 30). I also discovered over the last couple of months that I really really should not drink the night before I’m due on. First-day stomach cramps, gut cramps, and headache is bearable; minor “couple of glasses of wine too much last night” mild queasiness and headache is bearable; both together is sitting on bathroom floor throwing up levels of awful. This never used to be the case!
Until a couple of years ago I didn’t know that some level of gut problems is very normal at the start of your period (I suppose it makes biological sense - all that muscle cramping going on in that area). It came up in discussion in a women-only online community I belong to, and everyone went “yeah, me too! I never realised that wasn’t just me!”.
In other news: have you encountered the Mooncup as an alternative to tampons? Particularly good for heavy flow as it’ll hold more than a tampon. (Also environmentally better; and cheaper.) I’ve had one for years & it’s fantastic.
Thene - I’m cautious about the “stop periods from happening” thing. There are a lot of side-effects to hormonal contraception (like what it can do to your sex drive), and they’re really not all that well known or well studied. And that’s without getting on to the fact that, at least in the UK, women are given very little information about what hormonal contraception is actually doing and what side-effects there might be.
Juliet - those side effects are often milder than the effects of the periods themselves. (Particularly if you use the IUS, which is only 20 micrograms a day - oral contraceptive payloads are measured in milligrams). As a huge proportion of women in the UK use hormonal contraception anyway, the no-periods options ought to be more visible than they are.
I’d argue that the side effects of taking hormones are perfectly well-studied - though excessive focus has been placed on the question of cancer, to no conclusive result. Curiously, I’ve rarely been let down by the contraceptive information I’ve received in the UK - merely once surprised by which of a list of possible side effects manifested in me most strongly - whereas I’ve had advice from a US gynaecologist that was so misleading every UK practitioner I’ve repeated it to has been appalled. Maybe I’ve had a different experience to you because I’ve never used oral contraceptives. I don’t know.
Well Alexis, you may have realized by now that the way to get people to disagree with you is to comment about a predominantly women’s issue in a place where a whole slew of very opinionated women are reading and say something like “I have never gotten a poor reaction from this.”
Recognizing periods as a medical condition sounds like a portion of the idea that we need better health care, period. (N’yuk n’yuk.) I mentioned that I’ve taken sick days for my period before, but that’s what sick days are for. I would be way, way more interested in seeing funding that went toward properly educating women on their options for birth control, as Thene was mentioning, than on providing me with free tampons.
I do see the advantages of having a government that takes gender into account when providing health care. However, I see no way of doing this without first getting our society to a point at which gender and body issues can be discussed freely in all contexts, not only medical ones.
I get where you’re coming from, and I get why you’re getting poor reactions from other readers. I think the suggestion is two steps ahead of itself.
Wendy-
Yea, see, for me, my period is not a beautiful thing. It’s just a thing I do, the way that I eat and sleep. As for extra lubrication, a brief funny story: My first boyfriend and I were fucking right at the end of my period once. I forewarned him, but he’d never really done anything during a woman’s period before. He pulled out, covered in blood, looked at me with horror, and said in a tiny voice, “I broke you!” I thought this was amazingly funny, and laughed so much that I fell right off his bed.
Thene, this is *such* a good point. I would have loved to be given this option, or at least known it existed when I was younger! (I don’t have health insurance at the moment, but I’ll be looking in to this in the future.) I don’t think that most women ever think of their periods as anything other than inevitable. As such, I have to wonder what the public reaction to such a treatment would be, were it widely advertised.
Yep. I’m the same way. I never thought about why this might be from a biological standpoint, but I know it’s one of the side effects of menstruation that almost *never* comes up in conversation.
I have a couple of friends who use this who have been pestering me to try it for quite some time, and at some point I will definitely do so. (I think they use something called a “Diva Cup,” though, probably a similar product?) It sounds like a great idea, but I always remember that I want to try it out on the day my period starts, and forget about it once it ends. When I do get one I’ll probably make a big fuss and (hopefully) be extremely happy.
Hahaha, poor boy! Something like that happened with the first boy I ever slept with - see, sometimes, even now, if you fuck me real hard (which is usually what I like), there may be blood. Especially with boys who are really long. I mean, what can you expect if your whacking my cervix? And the poor boy hadn’t ever experienced that before. He too thought he broke me. (Though, where your boy was funny, mine started crying. Sensitive is nice, but you can be too sensitive.)
I think just about everything about the human body is beautiful and amazing, even the not so great stuff. I think, once you’ve physically seen, in person, the insides of a human body, you can’t help but feel that way. I remember the first time I ever saw the female genital system from the inside, I was in awe. Its all so tiny! And a baby can grow in there? Wow! And breathing! Its so awesome to think that *lungs* those crazy squishy things, help you live! The liver? That big (heavy, livers are heavy) brown thingie takes toxins out of your body? Thats so cool!
Ask Avah about the Divacup - she uses it. I keep meaning to ask to see it, since I’m thinking about switching. I’m debating trying, but I get nervous about new things. Though I’m told the cups help prevent dryness, coz they don’t absorb *everything* the way a tampon does.
Hi Sue! Great tampon story. I still don’t remember the moment I figured sex out.
I knew when I was writing this entry that this question was going to come up. And I certainly don’t mind you asking, nor do I mind answering, although the reason isn’t all that exciting.
There were a lot of benefits for me when I was on the pill, but not quite as many as there should have been, I think. This was definitely, in part, my own fault, and here’s why: in the four years that I was taking birth control, I never got through a single month without missing a dose.
The reality is that I simply suck at remembering to take pills on a daily basis. It’s ridiculous how bad I am at doing this, considering that I do so many other things daily without any trouble at all. Maybe it was my schedule in college, maybe it was that I wasn’t having a lot of sex and so didn’t think about it often, maybe it was that I kept losing the damn box. Whatever it was, I wasn’t protected from pregnancy the way I was supposed to be.
When I started on the pill, I was under my parent’s health insurance. I started because I had become sexually active, and I saw the pill as a way to reduce my acne and make my sex life safer. The regularity of the periods was a fringe benefit that came afterward.
Four years later I was about to come off of my parent’s health insurance, I wasn’t being protected from pregnancy any more than I already was by using condoms (I never stopped using condoms even when I was on the pill - I tried it once and it freaked me out), and my acne was still going strong. (My skin did not clear up from the pill.)
Frankly, at that point I didn’t see any real benefits. My pregnancy fear was drastically reduced, I was making better choices about sex and felt more comfortable with my sex life and my body, and I realized that I didn’t know much about the hormones involved with the pill or how they were affecting me. So I stopped taking it.
As for the painful periods, they didn’t vanish with the pill, although they were reduced. And I know this is, again, my crappy pill-taking in action, but I didn’t like stressing about remembering to take the things. Pain I can deal with; irritation is beyond me. (I know, strange.)
Would I go back on it now, if I could afford to do so? No, probably not. If I could get an option similar to what Thene uses, which stopped my periods altogether, I would consider that a worthwhile goal to investigate and maybe follow through on. But taking that pill every day just so I know my period will come on a Wednesday afternoon? Nah. That’s not worth my time :).
Thats why I switched to the OrthoEvra Patch, and then the NuvaRing - I can’t remember to take pills everyday. (Which is bad, considering I now have to remember to take my mental meds..but if I miss one of them, I won’t get knocked up)
Its nice not to have to think about b/c all that much. The ring can also come out for a few hours, should I need to remove it for anything.
Alright. I’m done pimping the ring. They aren’t even paying me. Jerks.
One of my ex-girlfriends tentatively asked me if I would still consider having sex with her if she were menstruating and I remember being surprised at the question. Apparently, other boys she had dated had said “no,” an answer I hadn’t even considered.
Another one of my ex-girlfriends wouldn’t let me near her vagina during her period, and I never pressed the issue.
Yikes! Speaking as someone who once took medications for a diagnosed mental illness, I would say that the potential consequences for missing one of those pills is far worse than forgetting contraceptive medication. There’s no such thing as an abortion for being psycho.
Its actually terrible if I miss one day - its if I get all bad and forget a couple of days in a row. I’m getting better about it. Also, people yell at me. That helps.
Eileen,
I suspect the reason I’m getting poor reactions from this group is because I’m Canadian.
I’ve run the idea around the people up here, and yes, once again it’s wholly positive. Canadians don’t see health care as patriarchal, invasive, descriminating or condescending. Strangely, they perceive it as a right, and feel that the difficult time which a woman spends each month ought to be acknowledged by both the medical community and the workplace.
Perhaps that is because they are used to receiving this sort of recognition.
Alexis, if the government is going to recognize “the difficult time which a woman spends each month” then, as a man, I want the same recognition. This has nothing to do with nationality.
I’m a Canadian, I’m female, and honestly I’d settle for just not having to pay GST on “feminine hygeine products”. They’re a fucking *necessity*, thank you - it’s not as though we can go out and gather a bunch of moss or whatever the hell people used to do.
Alexis, I’m from the UK & therefore have a similar attitude to Canadians about healthcare. I’m still uncomfortable about menstruation being treated as a medical condition. OTOH I do agree that tampons/pads shouldn’t be subject to VAT (as per other essentials!).
I would like to see it being more OK to take sick leave for *everyone* when they’re not fit for work - whether that’s due to menstruation or illness or whatever.
Eileen - yep, the DivaCup is basically the same thing. Really: go order one (of whichever) now, while you’re thinking about it! Totally worth it, no question.
May - perhaps one of the reasons I’m good at taking my pill every day is because I took antidepressants every day for a few years. That was very good training for knowing the importance of making that a part of my routine. But Eileen, I can see how not having a routine life (i.e., a college schedule) can really get in the way of taking your pill every day. When I was first seeing Jason, I forgot to take my pill all the time, because half the time I wasn’t staying over at my own place. It’s really easy for me now, though, because I have such a routine - I keep it on my kitchen counter and take it with my OJ every morning. (I love routines.) But I admit, I still struggle to remember when I go away. Thanks for filling me in on the reasons.
I have to say, that as appealing as the idea of not having my period is, I can’t seem to get behind it. It’s purely an emotional reaction, but it seems to me like my body is supposed to do this once a month, so I should let it go ahead. Which makes no sense, since medical science tells me that if I’m not planning on kids anytime soon, my body doesn’t really need to do this. Plus, I’m already screwing around with what my body naturally does by putting my system on a schedule with hormones. But I just can’t do it.
Sticking my big nose in where it surely doesn’t belong:
it’s my very shaky understanding that way back when women used to have far fewer periods than modern women as a result of breast-feeding kiddies for years at a time, which produces hormones that prevent ovulation. Which implies: actually, I have no idea. I’m sure someone’s written a thesis or research paper on the consequences of varying numbers of periods of a woman’s lifetime, excuse me while I hit the library.
But good job Eileen in bringing new meaning to the name of your blog.
I must say that I’m amazed that even with this lovely group of open people, when discussing birth control, the IUD hasn’t come up.
I’m an IUD user, and have been for about 6 months now. The copper, not the hormonal. It’s got it’s pros and cons
PROS:
- it lasts for 10-12 years. yes, 10-12 YEARS, with little effort on my part
the only effort involved is sticking my fingers inside myself once a month, to make sure the cord is still sticking out of my cervix, and, as my fingers generally go exploring several times a week, this is no great hardship.
- no hormones.
this is important to me, because the hormones in birth control make me be NotMyself. there is no good way to explain this, because NotMyself isn’t a meaner, colder, more negative version of me. NotMyself is also not warmer, friendlier, or move positive. NotMyself is simply…NotMyself. It’s impossible to explain, and entirely ephemeral, and yet, I felt oddly more myself than I had in years, once it was gone.
I was on hormonal birth control from age 12 to 27. I used numerous types of the pill, the ring, the patch, and the shot. When I finally got off of birth control, it took about 6 months for the NotMyself to fade away. And it feels great.
CONS
- getting it in fucking hurt
this is in part because of my own unique physical make-up. my uterus tips backward instead of forward, putting an extra kink in my cervix, which made getting the IUD in more of a trial than usual. According to my doctor, who has inserted over 1000 IUDs, I had one of the largest kinks to get past, which explained a lot of the pain.
the other part of the pain is that generally the pain of getting it in is related to your regular cramping intensity. And since my cramps are usually quite painful, the IUD insertion was accordingly painful.
- irregular periods for a few months, increased cramps and increased period time.
my first two period after the IUD sucked, both in how long they were (about 2 weeks from 1st spotting to last spotting) and cramping (about 2 weeks too, totally sucked). having had the IUD for 6 months now, both period time, and cramps are much more like my usual misery. I still have a heavier flow (though I use the above mentioned DivaCup, so it’s not that big a deal), and I cramp a bit more, but it’s more than worth the 10 years of being pregnancy-free.
- the cost
the IUD itself + visit to have it put in cost $350. Though I have good insurance, it wasn’t covered at all. Divide that $350 by 10 years & it’s much more palatable, but it was still painful to cough up at the time. Luckily, my partner paid for half, so it wasn’t as big a deal. I’ve also heard that some insurances do cover it, so it could probably be cheaper for other people.
So that’s my birth control spiel. I hope more women consider the IUD. It’s only been 1/2 a year, but so far, it’s been great for me. :)
2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] post by nipples - Google News and software by Elliott [...]
[...] girls just need to talk about our periods, or at times, our ‘feminine hygiene products’ (On a side note, why are condoms nearly [...]
Post a Comment