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the state of my innards
Well, this is a fun story that's happening to me right now.
When the prince was about five months old, I finally got around to reestablishing birth control; of course lactational amenorrhea wasn't going to last forever. Because my blood pressure has often been slightly on the high side of normal (and was especially Slightly Interesting during my pregnancy) and because I'm over 35, my doctor didn't want to put me back on the pill. Apparently there are guidelines about that. Plus the regular pill is evidently contraindicated while nursing, and the mini pill seemed less interesting for reasons I can't remember - anyway, about a year and a half ago I got Mirena, the IUD+hormones.
I was still nursing for the first few months I had it, and even after the boy quit nursing I was still pumping full time, so I didn't get my period until I'd had the thing for about six months. The first few cycles were no problem - light to medium bleeding, not as minimal as I'd had on the pill but nothing I couldn't handle, and the cycle was about 27 days, which is fine. But after two or three months of that - so by now we're talking about this past spring - a series of undesirable events occurred:
So two weeks ago I started the pill (which I haven't taken in almost three years), and there was a week of overlap before getting the IUD out. There had originally been going to be a whole month, just for scheduling reasons, but I was miserable with nausea and didn't want to live like that any longer than I had to, so I changed the appointment. Had the thing out last Monday; the doctor said she didn't think the nausea was likely to be due to the double dose of hormones, but she didn't think the flulike symptoms were likely to be due to the IUD in the first place, so who knows - in any case she removed the IUD and hoped I felt better. Said I might have some spotting following the removal and sent me on home. Monday evening and Tuesday sure enough there was slightly spotting. Nothing one would even need to address, just some visible traces after I peed.
Wednesday evening, out of nowhere, I started bleeding in a rush. I mean I stopped to pee at about 5pm before heading to day care to pick up the prince, and there was no sign of anything; an hour and a half later when I got up from the dinner table, I could feel dampness in my pants and assumed I'd been sweating; but when I went to get in the shower to rinse the prince off after his bath (hall bath renovation means baby bath time is happening in the master bath walk-in, which doesn't have a hand-held shower head - it's a whole thing) it turned out there was blood everywhere. I'd bled through my underwear and my jeans and, it turns out, left a slight spot on the couch. :-/ I have not experienced that level of surprise!messiness since I was about 12.
And, like, okay, Himself took the kid after his bath and got bedtime started so I could clean myself up, and I thought, okay, weird, because I'm in week 2 of a triphasic pill, so I wouldn't have guessed this would have happened? but ... okay. Thursday and Friday were sort of what normal heavyish period days used to be like, except I didn't have the kinds of cramps I used to get before I was on the pill - only then one of those evenings, I can't remember which, at one point I went to the bathroom and suddenly there was a gush of impressive clotting and a splitting headache to go with it. Himself brought me an ice pack and a dose of ibuprofen and it helped, but totally strange.
Saturday morning it seemed to have mostly run its course. Maybe lightened up, maybe all the way gone. We took the prince to the zoo and came home around lunch time; I went to the bathroom around 11:45, pulled out an almost-clean tampon and put in a new one, sat with Himself and the prince while the latter had some lunch, and took him upstairs to put him down for his nap - and when I left his room at 1pm I had bled all the way through everything: the tampon that had been brand-new less than an hour and a half earlier, my underwear, and my jeans. It was a bigger mess than there had been on Wednesday, and it had happened (a) faster and (b) with a tampon in place. When I removed that tampon I could feel a clot fall out of my body behind it.
So that was a phone call to the advice line. After consulting with the on-call ob/gyn, the advice nurse said this was not unexpected following the removal of the IUD, and I could also expect a regular period when I get to the week off at the prescribed time in the pill pack. Fun times for the next couple of weeks, then, but nobody's particularly scared, especially if that rate of bleeding through doesn't keep up. And of course it hasn't; it's not entirely through, but it's down to something much more like a trickle. Of course today is day 5, and there's no way to predict how long this particular anomalous period will go on - it's apparently several months' worth of buildup shedding all at once. Awesome.
In short: I DON'T LIKE IT. But I didn't like the IUD and I always felt fine on the pill (except a time when some inert ingredient was giving me unbearably crankypants side effects, which was solved by switching to a different formulation), so I am filled with hope that it won't be much longer before my system sorts itself out for better.
When the prince was about five months old, I finally got around to reestablishing birth control; of course lactational amenorrhea wasn't going to last forever. Because my blood pressure has often been slightly on the high side of normal (and was especially Slightly Interesting during my pregnancy) and because I'm over 35, my doctor didn't want to put me back on the pill. Apparently there are guidelines about that. Plus the regular pill is evidently contraindicated while nursing, and the mini pill seemed less interesting for reasons I can't remember - anyway, about a year and a half ago I got Mirena, the IUD+hormones.
I was still nursing for the first few months I had it, and even after the boy quit nursing I was still pumping full time, so I didn't get my period until I'd had the thing for about six months. The first few cycles were no problem - light to medium bleeding, not as minimal as I'd had on the pill but nothing I couldn't handle, and the cycle was about 27 days, which is fine. But after two or three months of that - so by now we're talking about this past spring - a series of undesirable events occurred:
- One month the cycle was more like 29 days, which was not a great thing when we were in the early throes of the disagreement about whether to have another kid. I assured him that although I do badly want another baby, that's not how I wanted it to happen, and I know he believed me, but it was still a pretty uncomfortable couple of days until it turned out it was just my system messing around with me. Feh.
- Another time I spent two or three days feeling really miserably flulike, sure that I was coming down with something awful, and then I didn't have the flu or anything like it but a couple of days later I got my period. Pretty light, but there it was. And then the same thing happened the following month. I think the third month was when it occurred to me HANG ON, I'm feeling fluey and wretched and it's been like four weeks since the last time I felt that way - but then no period. Or maybe there was? A bit of spotting?
- Meanwhile, the lighter-and-lighter periods had more or less disappeared and I occasionally had some spotting but never anything for definite. So I couldn't really tell when the cycle was beginning or what.
So two weeks ago I started the pill (which I haven't taken in almost three years), and there was a week of overlap before getting the IUD out. There had originally been going to be a whole month, just for scheduling reasons, but I was miserable with nausea and didn't want to live like that any longer than I had to, so I changed the appointment. Had the thing out last Monday; the doctor said she didn't think the nausea was likely to be due to the double dose of hormones, but she didn't think the flulike symptoms were likely to be due to the IUD in the first place, so who knows - in any case she removed the IUD and hoped I felt better. Said I might have some spotting following the removal and sent me on home. Monday evening and Tuesday sure enough there was slightly spotting. Nothing one would even need to address, just some visible traces after I peed.
Wednesday evening, out of nowhere, I started bleeding in a rush. I mean I stopped to pee at about 5pm before heading to day care to pick up the prince, and there was no sign of anything; an hour and a half later when I got up from the dinner table, I could feel dampness in my pants and assumed I'd been sweating; but when I went to get in the shower to rinse the prince off after his bath (hall bath renovation means baby bath time is happening in the master bath walk-in, which doesn't have a hand-held shower head - it's a whole thing) it turned out there was blood everywhere. I'd bled through my underwear and my jeans and, it turns out, left a slight spot on the couch. :-/ I have not experienced that level of surprise!messiness since I was about 12.
And, like, okay, Himself took the kid after his bath and got bedtime started so I could clean myself up, and I thought, okay, weird, because I'm in week 2 of a triphasic pill, so I wouldn't have guessed this would have happened? but ... okay. Thursday and Friday were sort of what normal heavyish period days used to be like, except I didn't have the kinds of cramps I used to get before I was on the pill - only then one of those evenings, I can't remember which, at one point I went to the bathroom and suddenly there was a gush of impressive clotting and a splitting headache to go with it. Himself brought me an ice pack and a dose of ibuprofen and it helped, but totally strange.
Saturday morning it seemed to have mostly run its course. Maybe lightened up, maybe all the way gone. We took the prince to the zoo and came home around lunch time; I went to the bathroom around 11:45, pulled out an almost-clean tampon and put in a new one, sat with Himself and the prince while the latter had some lunch, and took him upstairs to put him down for his nap - and when I left his room at 1pm I had bled all the way through everything: the tampon that had been brand-new less than an hour and a half earlier, my underwear, and my jeans. It was a bigger mess than there had been on Wednesday, and it had happened (a) faster and (b) with a tampon in place. When I removed that tampon I could feel a clot fall out of my body behind it.
So that was a phone call to the advice line. After consulting with the on-call ob/gyn, the advice nurse said this was not unexpected following the removal of the IUD, and I could also expect a regular period when I get to the week off at the prescribed time in the pill pack. Fun times for the next couple of weeks, then, but nobody's particularly scared, especially if that rate of bleeding through doesn't keep up. And of course it hasn't; it's not entirely through, but it's down to something much more like a trickle. Of course today is day 5, and there's no way to predict how long this particular anomalous period will go on - it's apparently several months' worth of buildup shedding all at once. Awesome.
In short: I DON'T LIKE IT. But I didn't like the IUD and I always felt fine on the pill (except a time when some inert ingredient was giving me unbearably crankypants side effects, which was solved by switching to a different formulation), so I am filled with hope that it won't be much longer before my system sorts itself out for better.