Women felt and feel rightly duped. Another sodding period lie told for more than half a century to benefit someone other than the bleeding woman suffering unnecessarily.
Of course, some women don’t want hormones in their body. They like being natural. They want to bleed – regardless of ovarian intention. Some argue the time of the month is a source of strength for them, or perhaps they can’t find a pill or contraceptive which doesn’t make them feel ropey. Others argue that ovulating naturally is good for one’s health, as is the natural production of the progesterone and oestrogen.
I ventured to Dr Dickson that perhaps a period is useful as a marker of health or ill health – and she batted away my concern with that easy breeziness and reassuring aura of a fact-laden specialist. She explained to me that there are usually other symptoms to other illnesses which don’t require periods as a signifier. I.e., if you had cancer of the womb, you would bleed anyway even if you were on a pill that stopped you bleeding; or polycystic ovaries would manifest through a range of other factors, such as excess hair growth or loss due to overactive male hormones.
It’s at this point I have something to confess to you.
While penning a book about periods I haven’t had a single one. Not so much as a menstrual splash until the very last chapter (you’re in for a treat). It feels odd, dishonest somehow, though I’ve definitely done my time in the menstrual trenches. I have indeed bled while writing. I did that for about six weeks. But it wasn’t menstrual. My period hiatus is because I’ve been pregnant. Pregnant with a baby I could have so easily missed out on having. And now, despite all of my doom-infused expectations I’ve had said baby (whoop!) – hence the six-week post-birth bleed. And then, because I’ve been breastfeeding the beauteous wonder that is our son, while battling mastitis (the vile blocked duct breastfeeding infection), I have yet to bleed naturally.
I have already told you it took two decades for me to be diagnosed with endometriosis, a debilitating period disorder that affects one in ten women – including Marilyn Monroe, Hilary Mantel and Lena Dunham, if you want to know the A-List.
I have already told you of my bewilderment and shame that I, a vociferous woman who loves asking tough questions and soliciting the truest answers I can, had failed again and again to secure a diagnosis – despite having traipsed in and out of doctors and gynaecologists over the years complaining of severe pain.
But what I haven’t told you is how my lack of diagnosis could have cost me and my husband the chance to have a biological baby.
And my experience strikes at the heart of why I am urging women to drop the shame a male-organised society has foisted upon us: our wellbeing and health.
But make no mistake, I am not preaching about the need to drop the period stigma so women are more clued up about their fertility. (Although this is a desirable side effect should women care to have children.) This is not some kind of dystopian Handmaid’s Tale plot twist.
Instead, I want to share what happened to me as a way of highlighting how knowledge is power. And how important it is to be as unashamed as possible, so we keep pushing for answers about areas of women’s health which have for centuries existed in the shadows. Too many women are simply soldiering on while struggling with all sorts of gynaecological and sexual issues because they think that is their lot in life.
Bluntly put, often we put up with our internal lady piping and vaginas not quite working as they should because we are embarrassed and we don’t believe it to be our absolute right for everything to be more than all right.
Nor are we always believed by the doctors who listen to our woes – once we muster up the energy to try to communicate our problems.
I always knew something was wrong with me gynaecologically but I too soldiered on. From age eleven, these heavy painful periods were the norm. I tried everything – strong painkillers, drinking coffee (which I loathed but my mum had heard could help), furry hot water bottles, lying on my stomach, and then, as I grew older, getting just that little bit more drunk on nights out when I was either about to start or in full flow. And then at university, I finally found a pill which agreed with me (although not the large quantities of booze I was imbibing – I went from being an excellent loving drunk to quite the vile bitch drama queen). Hence began the great cover-up as I like to call it.
From the age of twenty-one to thirty, I happily chomped my way through pill packet after pill packet, and my periods, although still uncomfortable, became more manageable. But when my husband and I decided perhaps we should start thinking about having a baby and I ditched the pill, my real periods – the dark bastards – really started to return.
We couldn’t get pregnant. We seemed to have gone from a place of not wanting a baby urgently, to everyone around me falling pregnant. Suddenly I was in a place I’d always feared: infertility. Because somewhere deep down, I knew I wasn’t quite right, even though every doctor and specialist told me I merely had a bad case of dysmenorrhoea, a fancy word for painful periods. With a great sense of foreboding, I had secretly dreaded the stage of my life when I would attempt to produce life, convinced something might be wrong. And here I was. And it wasn’t going well. Far from it.
As each month went by during our two years of trying, my periods were getting worse. They were starting to reveal themselves in their full natural horror, free of the contraceptive mask which had been restraining them for the last decade. The lowest point I can remember on this knackering journey was during a holiday in Sweden, from whence my mother-in-law hails, walking behind her, my father-in-law and my husband, after a sunny coffee and cinnamon bun pit stop on a picnic bench. I felt like iron chains were dragging my stomach down, pulling me towards the floor, as my bones ground against each other during what should have been a lovely easy amble around a Stockholm park. I came to a complete stop, unable to take another step. I just couldn’t move anymore. The period pain was so great. I stumbled to the closest bench and didn’t move for a long, long time.
That was the moment I knew I needed some cold hard medicine. Not some muddy herbal tea nonsense from an overpriced acupuncturist. Nor another expensive and pointless colonic irrigation that did nothing other than to make me feel lightheaded and immediately crave a greasy cheese and caramelised onion toastie.
On that day, I admitted the first of two defeats. The first was that something was wrong with me to the extent that action was required. A week later I was booked in for a laparoscopy, a keyhole procedure which serves both as a diagnostic tool and a treatment for endometriosis. So, you sign off having a diagnosis and treatment while you are under anaesthetic, meaning you either wake up after a few minutes as no action was required or after a few hours as the doctor has been beavering away.
I was the latter. I did indeed have it, endometrium (old womb lining which should leave one’s body during a period), coating my organs, mainly my bowel and bladder, but very luckily it hadn’t stuck to my ovaries, uterus or fallopian tubes. The disease was at stage two of four. Moreover, after two and half hours of painful lasering (during which they inflate your organs with air) the doctor felt he had managed to remove all of it.
In the six months after a laparoscopy, women who have struggled to conceive naturally because of endo have a much higher chance of doing so. And the debilitating pain can go away or be significantly reduced. Sadly, despite our best efforts – and they really were Herculean – pregnancy still wasn’t happening and my periods were as punishing as ever.
Hence came my second defeat, as I stupidly and naively chose to view it at the time: I agreed to IVF. Not being able to fall pregnant felt like a huge failure. We’d been told repeatedly that our infertility was unexplained, so I had strongly resisted the idea of IVF previously because having such a major intervention felt like I really had failed and that we’d reached the end of the road.
An amazing older female doctor in the NHS promptly disabused me of