I had been working on this entry for close to a year. Things just kept changing and other things kept coming up, but I feel like now is the right time to write about this.
In 2006, I gave all of my tampons and pads away to girlfriends. I didn’t need them. It certainly wasn’t menopause, and pregnancy was out of the question. I had hyperprolactinemia. In English, that means I have high prolactin levels in my blood. Prolactin is a hormone produced in the pituitary gland and is primarily responsible for milk production during lactation.
Milk production during lactation? What the fuck does that mean? Was I lactating (the answer has consistently been: no)? I spoke to doctor after doctor, from family practitioners to endocrinologists, to no avail. There have been endless MRIs, blood tests, acupuncture sessions, and explanations, over and over again. And, here’s the catch: of all the blood tests that I have done in the past two years, my prolactin levels are in normal range.
I think know the root cause, but I do not know how to cure it. Junior year of high school, I swayed under the pressure of my then boyfriend who told me that I should just get on birth control so he didn’t have to slip on a condom every time we did it. My horny ex-boyfriend couldn’t cope any longer with the fact that he had to actually obtain condoms before he sticks it in.
My naïveté drove me to make an appointment with my doctor. I told her I wanted birth control for its beneficial side effects on skin. She prescribed Ortho Tri-cyclen Lo, which resulted in a month long period disaster. Ironic that the opposite effect happened, and I did not end up having sex once that month. Nevertheless, months went by, and everything was fine. (On a side note: if the quality of sex could have been a determinant of whether or not you’d get pregnant (with good meaning preggers, and bad meaning infertile), I would have been calling up adoption agencies and ask for every unadopted child available. It was the worst sex EVER.) Well…that commentary was not needed.
Even though I broke up with him by the end of my freshman year in college, I continued to take birth control pills for the convenience of predictable and lighter periods. By the middle of my sophomore year at Brown in 2005, the periods continued to get lighter, and I decided to give up the pills in hopes that things would go back to normal.
It didn’t.
In 2008, I still face the consequences of actions I made in 2003. Every time I came home from college or abroad I would be bombarded with blood tests, MRI scans, acupuncture, therapy, and consulting sessions with doctors. After three lousy years of that, I became dependent on 2.5 mg of bromocriptine every night. Did I mention that if I missed one dose by a few hours, I’m doomed to have a week-long period?
I took hormone pills, worried about how I’d never be able to bear children, and just generally felt like a menopausal woman. What was weird was that it would make brief re-appearances whenever I hooked up with someone. Soon, after my affairs ended, my period also disappeared. At least I knew then that I wasn’t completely broken.
A few months ago, I was still taking hormones. Now I have my period every other week. You heard right. EVERY. OTHER. WEEK. As if my uterus was trying to make up for lost time. And lord is it letting me know. I’m even considering going back ON the pill just to regulate this shit.
Fortunately, this summer I saw a wonderful doctor who helped me figure out what was going on. Yes, I did more lab tests and even got an ultrasound, but he deemed me perfectly healthy. Seeing no use for it, he told me to stop taking the hormone. I’ve been feeling more optimistic, even though my body is still figuring out that a period once every 28 days is fine. I still worry about the long term (i.e., children?), but I can’t dwell on that now. I have too much going for me.
I hope that I can be hormonally normal again soon. I’ve learned never to fuck around with nature using artificial hormones. And I suggest you think twice before listening to what those bitches say about “Yaz” on TV and getting only .560283 periods a year.