#and i couldn't find anything about that pill treating pmdd

[donttouchtheneednoggle]

Was anyone gonna tell me birth control was this powerful???

[eimearkuopio]

I am Catholic and I've been through hell solely due to that fact (well, that PLUS my periods). I started to menstruate at 11 (so definitely not a woman, tysm @integralistweeb) and within a year was losing enough blood to bleed through (yes THROUGH) a pad within about half an hour. Was this taken seriously? NO. Heavy pads - overnight pads - pray I could get through a 40-minute class without bleeding through everything - why are you so careless that you still get bloodstains on your underwear, your sheets, your mattress - be more careful (I went to bed with my underwear lined with stick-on pads and it only worked about half the time; I asked if there were some kind of period diaper and was stared at as if I had grown a second head; eventually I gave up caring and just did what I could) - found out at 17 that everyone in my year knew when I had my period because for a week I was just ashen - when I did my Leaving Cert they put me on meds to stop my period for that month, delayed my period and extra strong painkillers because if I got my period during my Leaving Cert it could "ruin my life" from their perspective but never mind what it was already doing to MY LIFE EVERY FUCKING MONTH - they gave me nuvaring at Uni but it turns out I'm allergic to extra oestrogen so when I started to get arm and leg pains they took me off that (good thing, too - it works for some women but it has a higher mortality rate than I care to think about) - then the progesterone-only mini pill which gave me suppurative acne but at least I wasn't haemorrhaging for the first time in my post-pubescent life (this was at about 25, btw, after I had started to bleed so much that I occasionally needed to give up on pads entirely and just sit on the toilet until the situation improved - but any time I went to see a doctor, they just gave me a pregnancy test EVEN THOUGH I WAS A VIRGIN and when it came back negative, they shrugged and sent me home instead of fucking TREATING MY HORRIFIC BLOOD LOSS) - ended up switching to Mirena which had fewer physical side effects but seemed to make my PMS jump to full-blown PMDD - took a year off that to see if my mental health improved and it just got SO MUCH WORSE - so now I'm back on Mirena, and in May, after decades of me begging to have my healthcare taken seriously and being told they couldn't do anything because what if I wanted to have children some day (and to be clear, I wasn't asking for a hysterectomy - I was asking for exploratory surgery to find out WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON) I have just been provisionally diagnosed with adenomyosis, and it means I'll probably need a hysterectomy, and if I'm unlucky, my womb will be taking some of my bladder and bowels with it. So if I've been a little grumpy for the past few months, and people are confused by that fact, I hope this has helped clarify things.

There was a TikTok post about an advertisement for “blood-making pills for weak women” someone found in a newspaper from the 1890s and everybody seemed to think it was just an example of the weird misogyny of the day and age but no. Anemia was a massive public health concern. It always has been through history but part of the reason we have this idea of old timey women thought history being physical weak, chronically cold and pale and fainting is because they often they were. Anemia was also a massive problem for men in that day but even now it disproportionally affects people who menstruate. So tonics full of stimulants and “healthful vitamins” were marketed at young women in pages upon pages of advertisements in every newspaper. People generally felt like shit all the time back then.