Oh hi.

As you know (if you happen to be one of my Three Loyal Readers), I have a jacked up uterus which has resulted in the whole No-Babies Thing. I also have PCOS, which results in Bizarre Period Timing. Basically my entire reproductive system is a huge failure. I’m not particularly happy about any of this (actually I’m pretty much devastated by it, when I think about it) but I’ve been dealing with it and try not to dwell.

Anyway. The reason I told you all that was so that I could segue into a blog post about MY PERIOD!!! Because why not?

I have never had a regular period. I got my first one on July 4th 1988 (just after my 12th birthday), my second one sometime that December, and… that’s pretty much how it went from then on. I would go for months at a time without any appearances from Her Ladyship. I asked my mom about it at some point that first year and she told me that when you first start out, it’s sometimes not all that regular. Made sense to me… and when it continued to be irregular I didn’t even think about it. I never bothered to worry, really, throughout high school. I’d go six months without one and just be glad I didn’t have to buy any Feminine Hygiene Products.

It was only when I got to university that I started to be annoyed by the sporadic nature of my menses. I wasn’t sexually active or anything (I *was* a giant nerd, plus attending a university where the ratio of girls to boys was something like 5:1… girls to straight boys, more like 7:1), so I wasn’t worried about pregnancy, but I was very much annoyed at the fact that my period would just appear when I least expected it and I was spending entirely too much time with brown paper towel from the French building’s washrooms stuffed into my underpants. Still, though, I didn’t want any doctors messing with my areas so I avoided talking about it with anyone until probably my third year, when I was 20. At this point I’d been getting my period for eight years, and it still hadn’t regulated itself. I went to my family doctor, explained the whole situation, and she put me on the Pill. It worked very well in that I stayed on it for five years and had a period once a month and that was fantastic I knew that on Wednesdays at about 1 pm everything was going to kick off.

Then I moved to Halifax and went to my new doctor for a refill on my birth control pills. She told me that the reason I hadn’t been getting my period regularly (because she’s a clairvoyant who could see 13 years into my past, I guess) was that I was overweight. Now, yes, I was overweight at that point – by about 30 lbs. But I wasn’t overweight in my teens and it was irregular then. Whatever to her. She told me that I should have an IUD put in. Which I did, because she was my doctor and I did what she said. I realize now that the excrutiating pain I had each month was the fact that my uterus is deformed, and not big enough for the IUD – so the little “arms” dug themselves into the sides.

AAAAAAAANYWAY. Then I had that thing removed and Rob and I tried for kids and we found out the horrible truth. After all that, I went back to my family doctor (the one who’s been my fam doc since I was five, not the one who blamed everything on me being fat) and said that I hadn’t had a period since I’d gone off the Clomid and I realized that I didn’t really need to have one since I wouldn’t be having kids but was that okay? And she explained that if I didn’t have at least four periods per year I was at higher risk for endometrial cancer which I definitely do not want. Back on the pill!

I guess I’ve been on the pill for two years now. Except that every now and then I go off it – like I just don’t take it for a month or so – to see if my body is still capable of doing anything vaguely female. And it usually does. And I then realize that I am far better off ON the pill. When I get a period without the pill, it is much heavier, MUUUUUUUCH more painful (she says while her uterus is squeezed in a viselike grip), and just plain evil than when I’m on the pill. Still though, I’m not a fan of putting extra hormones into myself (yeah, after years of Clomid and whatever other attempts to have babies). Of course if it’s going to prevent me from getting cancer I’ll do it. Small price to pay and all.

AND NOW YOU KNOW THE STORY OF MY MENSTRUATION. ENJOY.