Chapter Three: “Periods Hurt Honey, Get Used To It”
My first period came when I was on a camping trip with my parents, I think I was twelve. I don’t remember much else about the experience, but I do remember being in the woods and having to use the campground’s bathroom to apply a pad to my underwear for the first time.
Some of my friends had already gotten their first period and others were eagerly awaiting this momentous event, but I don’t recall eager anticipation, or anything really. Beginning to bleed out of my vagina every month seemed like yet another awful thing that was just happening to my body, completely outside of my control.
For a blissful couple of years, my period was as normal as a pubescent period can be. It came when it came and I regarded it as a minor annoyance. The typical period horror stories didn’t happen to me; I never bled through my pants, I never had to fumble privately and painfully with a tampon because I trusted my mother enough to ask her to show me what to do, and I was never caught unprepared due to my borderline neurotic habit of stocking my backpack with everything I might ever need.
Around the time I turned fourteen, my monthly experience changed abruptly and drastically. It started with excruciating pain in my lower abdomen. I’d had period cramps before, but they hadn’t felt anything like this pain. When I had period cramps I could take a couple of Advil and they’d go away. This new pain that ripped and tore through me hurt more than anything I’d ever felt. It was so bad that I would get dizzy, so bad that I would double over and sometimes literally fall to the floor. Often the pain was so bad that it would make me nauseous. Sometimes I’d even vomit. I couldn’t imagine what could cause this kind of pain, and neither could my mother.
We saw doctor after doctor. I would describe my pain and the doctors, mostly male, would look at me with skeptical eyes. They’d pull out the pain chart — the one with all of the faces — and ask me to rate my pain. When I chose the eight or nine faces, the doctors fought to keep their own faces serious. More than one asked me outright if I was exaggerating. All of them at least implied that I was.
Doctor after doctor gave me the same diagnosis — IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. They told me that the pain I was feeling was just gas and that I needed to be careful about my diet, which they said with extra emphasis since I was a fat girl. They said that I should avoid fatty, greasy, fried foods. My mother and I insisted that we ate a relatively healthy diet, home-cooked meals every night. Their eyes always critically scanned our bodies — both overweight — and dismissed our claims. How could we possibly look the way we did if we ate as healthily as we claimed we did?
They gave us instructions for foods to avoid and dismissed us with a brusque nod. Not one of them asked me about my menstrual cycle or my menstrual symptoms, so I didn’t make the connection that the pain always coincided with the two weeks that preceded my cycle. I just knew that I was in excruciating pain every month.
Since I was so consumed by the pain, it took me a few months to notice that my menstrual bleeding had changed too. I started to bleed through tampons every few hours. The blood was clumped with terrifying clots I’d never seen before. The regular stock of tampons in my backpack became insufficient to get me through the school day.
When I ran out and I was too embarrassed to ask my friends for a tampon, I’d wrap my underwear in toilet paper and awkwardly waddle between classes for the rest of the day. I started to bleed through onto my underwear. I can’t remember the number of bloodstained panties that I threw out in the high school’s bathrooms. A few times the classic nightmare happened and I bled on my pants. I was always too embarrassed to go to the nurse’s office and wait out the rest of the day, so I’d change into my gym clothes or wrap a sweatshirt around my waist and pray that no one would notice.
Though my mother had taught me to never be embarrassed about my period, those lessons didn’t stand up to the shame of being a teenager with a malfunctioning body. None of my other friends talked about bleeding through their tampons. None of them were tossing their panties in the trash. None of them were walking around with blood on their pants. As far as I knew, my period was weird and in high school, there’s nothing worse than being weird, especially if you’re fat. So, I didn’t talk about it.
Eventually, my mother put it all together — the bloodstained underwear, the pain that came with alarming regularity, and only left when I finally stopped bleeding — and concluded that I needed to have my very first pelvic exam. When I flatly refused to see the family practitioner I’d been seeing since I was a toddler, she scheduled my first appointment with a gynecologist. I have no recollection of the actual appointment, but I do remember the conclusion — that everything would be fixed if I went on the pill.
I wasn’t disappointed by this conclusion. I’d been dating my boyfriend for over a year and getting the pill for a medical reason was much easier than trying to figure out how to get it so I could have sex. I happily accepted the prescription and went with my mother to pick it up.
Given the severity of my symptoms, the gynecologist prescribed me a high estrogen pill hoping this would get my symptoms under control. I wouldn’t find until years later that my symptoms were actually caused by a chronic reproductive illness that thrives on estrogen. The pill the gynecologist prescribed was pretty much the opposite of the solution, but I didn’t know that. And because she hadn’t taken the time to explore my symptoms further than concluding they were abnormal and that the pill was the answer, neither did she.
Shortly after I started taking the high estrogen pills, I began experiencing intense mood swings. I already struggled with depression and anxiety, and on the high estrogen pills, these became even more pronounced. I was so depressed that I had to be dragged out of bed in the morning and forced to go to school. I had intrusive suicidal thoughts every day. My anxiety increased to the level of paranoia and I was soon too afraid to be left alone. Anger escalated to rage and I was verbally violent. Though I was never the most emotionally stable teenager, the sudden change in my behavior led my mother and me back to the gynecologist. Instead of asking me about my menstrual symptoms, which hadn’t improved on the pill, the doctor offhandedly wrote me another prescription and sent me on my way.
The rest of my years in high school were spent switching between every type of hormonal birth control pill on the market. Each time I went back to a gynecologist — I saw several different ones — and explained that the pills made me feel crazy or that they didn’t make my period any more manageable, they simply wrote a new prescription and promised that this was the pill that was going to make me feel better. The result was always the same — a new prescription and a dismissal.
One of the several gynecologists I saw glibly responded with words I’ll never forget, “Periods hurt honey. You’re just gonna have to get used to it.” After that, I took the pills regardless of whether they worked and stopped trying to find a solution. I heard the message loud and clear — my periods were a bit weird but they weren’t going to get better, and I was just going to have to learn to deal.
And for years, all I did was deal. I went to classes and eventually work even if the pain was so bad that I could barely stay in my seat or on my feet. I threw up in bathrooms, wiped my face, popped a mint, and went back to what I was doing. I started carrying around entire boxes of tampons instead of a pocketful in my purse or backpack. I kept a few backup outfits in my car, just in case. Every time the excruciating pain came, I told myself it wasn’t that bad. I popped 800 milligrams of Advil and went on with my life.
Instead of continuing to look for a solution, continuing to be told by doctors that I was crazy, that I was exaggerating, that I was too sensitive, that I should toughen up, I became an expert at ignoring the signals my body was sending me. My body wasn’t something to be heeded, it was something to be ignored. It was a malfunctioning nuisance that needed to be brought under control.
I endured ten more years of pain, ten more years of hating and blaming my body for its dysfunction before I found out that I was actually sick. Ten years of suffering that I wouldn’t have had to endure if I had simply been listened to, believed.
