I hate being on the birth control pill for the following reasons:
- NAUSEA
- I feel like I’m constantly underwater
- my mood swings get worse
- NAUSEA
- my periods feel foreign
- NAUSEA
*sigh*
Yesterday I wasn’t sure if I’d taken a pill that morning, so I took another one last night. This morning, I was really really sick. Puking up empty air and water since 7am this morning. (It’s now nearly 11am). I’m missing class right now too. I emailed my teacher and tried to discreetly explain that no, I’m not hung-over but I don’t know if she got the email in time… I didn’t want to miss class today. This means I can’t miss friday’s class after the Sherman Alexie talk… gah.
Anyway… I think I’m going to go puke again… I wish this would stop. nothing helps. Even puking doesn’t help the nausea go away. god i hate this… I just want to die.
carmiebob | 18-May-05 at 10:50 am | Permalink
It sounds like you need to switch brands, have you tried more than one? I got lucky and have always been on the same one, but I know a lot of women have to try a few times to find the formulation that’s best for them. I’m sorry you’re sick, I hope you feel better soon!
starladear6 | 18-May-05 at 11:30 am | Permalink
I’m on Alesse, which is one of the low-dosage ones… doctor says that other alternatives are totally different systems of BC… but I’m not taking it for BC really. I’m taking it because my periods are 72 days apart (and growing) and I can’t afford the tests they want me to take to find out what’s wrong.
pottedplant | 18-May-05 at 11:35 am | Permalink
Aimee has had problem after problem with birth control. The first stuff made her cry all the time. I don’t remember what the second one did, but we ended up switching from that to a Mircette, which we believe caused her to get hypertension. Her blood pressure shot up to 140/90 and she’s 26 years old. A girl in her 20s has hypertension. Before going on this birth control, it was 110/70.
So now we’re back to good old fashioned latex barriers. Bleh.
carmiebob | 18-May-05 at 11:41 am | Permalink
I started taking mine for period control too, since I didn’t want to start living in the dorms never knowing when my period was going to start. Good luck, I hope they start treating you better.
starladear6 | 18-May-05 at 11:55 am | Permalink
yeah… hormones are fun. pure awesome. The fact that there are so many unknowns about the menstrual cycle and female hormones is actually pretty frightening to me…
like what the hell has medical science been doing all these decades? treating the menstrual cycle as an annoyance and a deviation from the norm in their medical studies and not studying it directly as often as they should? (yes).
:)
autarchex | 18-May-05 at 1:41 pm | Permalink
treating the menstrual cycle as an annoyance and a deviation from the norm
I think once they figured out that they could prescribe pills to just eliminate menstruation completely, they just got lazy and didn’t bother studying it.
autarchex | 18-May-05 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
Feeling like you are underwater? That sure doesn’t sound fun.
Well, in addition to the horrible nausea, of course.
suntyger | 18-May-05 at 5:11 pm | Permalink
Ugh. I’ve finally found one that has minimal side effects (Yasmin), but any time I forget one and have to take two at once, I wake up the next morning feeling like I’m about to puke.
I’d also suggest switching brands–I’ve been quite happy with Yasmin, but other brands have thrown my body so out of whack I don’t even recognize it anymore. Everyone’s chemistry is different, so you really just have to keep trying stuff until something works.
starladear6 | 18-May-05 at 5:55 pm | Permalink
*ahem*
that’s not what the pill does. *poke poke*
autarchex | 18-May-05 at 6:18 pm | Permalink
Most of them can be used to do that. At least one is specifically formulated for that purpose. Or so claimed its ads in the paper.
starladear6 | 18-May-05 at 8:22 pm | Permalink
If a woman doesn’t shed her lining regularly, she could get sick and die.
They don’t stop menstruation. they stop ovulation. There are a few that are designed to keep menstruation down to the medically accepted minimum for health (4 a year), but not eliminate them.
sweetp285 | 18-May-05 at 9:30 pm | Permalink
Have you ever tried other methods? Im on the nuva ring and it works really well for me. i experience very little if any side effects from it. when i was on the pill and took more then one in a day i would get sick, with the ring it is a constant dose, and because of that i dont get sick from it at all…something to think about
autarchex | 19-May-05 at 12:20 am | Permalink
Still, plenty of people use them to be rid of it altogether, whether it is healthy or not.
starladear6 | 19-May-05 at 2:29 am | Permalink
I think you’re misunderstanding whoever told you that. Or they were exaggerating.
They can’t do that with the pill anyway. There is breakthrough bleeding after a few months because the lining gets too thick. if it gets infected, you’re fucked, so no doctor would ever give a girl BC without explaining that she needs to menstruate.
The pills don’t stop the lining from forming, so there must be menstruation. they just stop ovulation, or implantation depending on which type.
autarchex | 19-May-05 at 2:53 am | Permalink
Apparently I was a little confused about the timeline of the product designed to eliminate them entirely. They are filing for FDA approval this year, so I guess it isn’t even available yet. Kind of makes me wonder where the hell I saw it… I thought it was in a newspaper ad, but I can’t see a company advertising a product they haven’t put into production yet.
http://www.wyeth.com/news/Pressed_and_Released/pr06_02_2004_09_39_48.asp
And as for the creative uses of pills not designed for this, I’m by no means knowledgable on the subject, and I’m sure you know more about it than I do. It was just my impression from friends that they didn’t have any periods, period (pun definitely intended :) I suppose I could have misunderstood, of course. I was told that with most types of the pill, you could just replace the week of blanks with actives from another pack. The rationale being, as noted by the source below, that:
“With continuous hormonal use the lining of the uterus does not thicken and thus there is nothing or very little for the uterus to empty.
http://www.fwhc.org/birth-control/continual-hormones.htm
Of course, I’m not sure how reliable that information is, since a quick google review of at least semi-respectable-looking medical sites seems to come up about 50-50 on the issue of whether or not the uterine lining thickens while on the pill.
Either way, due to my inherent laziness, I’ve given up delving deeper into that mystery, favoring sleep instead.
starladear6 | 19-May-05 at 10:09 am | Permalink
I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t stop the lining from growing. Remember Seasonale? That recent pill that was on TV all the time saying it was the first one to let a woman have just 4 periods a year? They recently got busted by the FDA for not disclosing the risks properly, and for being misleading. (break-through bleeding, which basically means “you still have a pretty normal period only you have no idea when it will happen” was still common in trials. that != only 4 periods.)
My doctor told me that a woman must have at least 4 bleeds a year or she risks various kinds of uterine cancer, no matter what kinds of hormones you take.
I doubt that drug that’s up for FDA approval will get approved. And if it does, I’m sure any doctor who has any sense will realize how little research/understanding about women’s cycles exists and not trust it. (They don’t even know what causes or how to actually treat polycystic ovarian syndrom!)
I did google and google and found some medications that claim they can eliminate periods, but none that I found listed the health risks, and all of them said break-through bleeding was still relatively common. Most of them involved two kinds of birth control used simultaneously (pills+ring), which means they’re hella incovenient too.
Anyway, you just encouraged me to get my BC education. This was fun.
Cara Fletcher | 31-Mar-07 at 2:31 am | Permalink
The problem with the birth control is huge.I started taking some ovulation kits and also some pills for controlling my cycle and for now there are no side effects.