Are we trivialising heavy periods? My heavy period nearly made me bleed out, and I was told that “it’s just one of those things”.
It’s August 2000. I’m a month away from turning sixteen, and I’m in Rome for World Youth Day. It’s a sort of Glastonbury for young Roman Catholics, except they’ve only got one song. The men and boys, who stay with the priests, get hot running water and a decent nights’ sleep. The women and girls, who have no equivalent clerical companions, shower in our swimsuits on pallets under a freezing cold hosepipe.
They want to remove my appendix. It’s only when I produce the medication I’m currently taking that the problem becomes clear—it’s not appendicitis; it’s a reaction to the pills I’ve been prescribed to stop my heavy periods. Stop taking these, I’m assured, and you’ll be fine. Just make sure you have plenty of pads with you.
Have you ever had a Catholic seminarian shame you for carrying a packet of sanitary towels from a pharmacy to a cafe rather than stuffing them straight into your backpack?
For a good Catholic girl like me, sex was a secondary concern. The mystery pills I’d been prescribed were the first in a long line of chemical attempts to mitigate my “just really heavy periods”. No PCOS, no endometriosis or adenomyosis, or anything medically diagnosable. My periods were regular and only six days long, which was deemed good. Over the next few years, I tried:
Microgynon: The one-stop shop for GPs who aren’t specialists in female reproductive health. It was only when I changed practices that I learnt I should never have been prescribed it—as a migraine sufferer, it put me at greater risk of stroke.
Depo-Pprovera: Otherwise known as getting your arse out for your GP once a month. I stopped getting it after going to the shops in my yoga pants and being told, loudly, that my “arse looked bumpy”. I confronted the man who shouted this at me and asked him why I would ever listen to the opinion of someone swigging Stella on top of a bin at 10:30 am. I still switched to baggy cargo pants, asked for a different contraceptive method, and body-brushed until I was the colour of Dr. Zoidberg from ‘Futurama’.
Mini-Pill (progestogen-only pill): Hi, would you like a watery period that lasts a whole month?
April 2022. It’s the Easter holidays. I no longer have much Catholic zeal left, although the deaths of several close relatives, including my father, have made me the go-to gal for picking funeral hymns. My periods have been getting heavier over the last couple of years, culminating (I think) in a uterine cast only a few weeks into my current job. My GP prescribes tranexamic acid, a blood clotting agent, but the 900mg of aspirin I have to take at the onset of a migraine cancels it out. Raspberry leaf tea helps with the cramps, and I sing its praises to anyone who’ll listen. A colleague tells me I look pale. I’m fine; I’m always pale; I have just had COVID after all. I’ll stick some fake tan on over the holidays.
So I do. I go to bed the colour of a newly varnished table, and I can’t sleep. I get up and go to the bathroom, and yep, still bleeding. The cramps are pretty bad, so I go downstairs and have a cup of raspberry leaf tea. Immediately the cramps subside. I Googled “periods after Covid.” It seems like a lot of women’s cycles have been messed up by it. I scratch at my left ear; my piercings have become more inflamed since having the virus.
Walking back upstairs, something doesn’t feel right. I go to the toilet and I’m bleeding—that is, the blood is literally running out of me, and it’s not stopping. I put in a new jumbo tampon and wash my hands, but it still feels weird. I pull the tampon out, and it’s saturated. I wake my partner and he calls NHS Direct. Can he bring me into A&E? Can we both wear face masks?
All I can think of at this point is how much I stink of fake tan. When I go to the loo in the hospital, the bleeding looks like it’s stopped. The second time I need to go, still waiting to be seen, I can’t even get the tampon in for all the blood that’s gushing out of me.
The nurses show me to a side room where I put on a hospital gown—this is where things get really scary. I start to pass clots. They’re the size of gobstoppers, and I can feel them as I pass them. My partner, who’s never even seen me pee, talks to me calmly as I try to manoeuvre the gigantic maxi pad and paper knickers they’ve given me. ‘I think you’re just going to have to leave those off and bleed,’ he says. And he’s right. For two hours, I just bleed. At one point, I have to stand and let my uterus empty itself onto the floor. I think of my mother having a hysterectomy at 39. Anne Hathaway is 39. So is the Duchess of Cambridge. I’m only 37. Will they give me a hysterectomy?
In emergency gynaecology, I have a room to myself and a pelvic exam. They need to do an ultrasound and my partner is sent home because there are vulnerable, pregnant women on the ward who are highly susceptible to COVID. I learned later that if I’d been pregnant, he’d have been allowed to stay. This enrages me – I estimate I’ve lost around two pints of blood, I’m dizzy and frightened, yet I have to be on my own here.
Because the ultrasound is clear, I’m given my depressingly narrow options again – the coil, a uterine ablation, or a hysterectomy. The latter two will render me infertile, so I opt for the coil. It’s fitted under general anaesthetic because no way in hell am I allowing something called a punch biopsy without being knocked out cold.
I listen to a lot of ‘Self-Esteem’ at this time. ‘Don’t be intimidated by all the babies they have; don’t be embarrassed that all you’ve had is fun.’ Christ, I haven’t even had fun.
Remember the mortification you felt at school, when you bled through your knickers and your grey pleated skirt (why was it always pleated?) onto the chair and everyone saw? Trust me, it’s no less fun when you’re 39, crouched on an office floor with a colleague watching over you because you might faint from lightheadedness.
People love to tell you that birth control doesn’t cause weight gain, and technically, it doesn’t, but what the coil does do is give me a drawn-out, three-week-long period, during which I am ravenously hungry all the time. As someone in ED recovery, this is not ideal. I feel as if I’m not in control of my body, I had the coil removed after eighteen months, and there still hasn’t been an explanation for the haemorrhage I suffered. Like my heavy periods, it’s just ‘One of Those Things’—possibly linked to COVID—but it makes me ripe for discussion once people find out. One colleague unhelpfully insists that I MUST be perimenopausal, and I almost believe her. Until seven months ago, when I got pregnant after only one month of trying.
On the one hand, the fact that I got pregnant so easily after stopping birth control is proof that side effects notwithstanding, its primary purpose was successful. On the other hand, a lot of women use birth control to mitigate heavy periods, and in that respect, it is still failing miserably for many of us. I cracked jokes during the haemorrhage and when I had my biopsy, posting selfies on Instagram with captions like “5* gynaecological rummage from the NHS” and “Nurse craic was LIT in post-op,” and jokingly said at my last midwife appointment that, as far as I’m concerned, my partner could keep me pregnant from now until menopause. But after nearly twenty-eight years of pills, injections, and being babysat by colleagues who feared I might pass out from blood loss, I was only half-joking.
I don’t know what the answer is for women like me who just have heavy periods. Not every woman wants to use chemical contraception. Not every woman will get pregnant and experience 10+ months of blissful menstrual relief. And no woman should be expected to simply grit her teeth and pray for menopause. I can’t offer medical advice beyond which brand of chocolate biscuits I’ve found best for avoiding a menstrual meltdown (M&S dark chocolate digestives), but I can say this: don’t make light of the situation. Don’t turn it into a joke. Humour is all very well, but it will only get you so far. Women’s health, especially reproductive health, has been treated as a joke by the medical profession for far too long. The last thing it needs is to be treated as a joke by us, too.
