Being female is NOT an illness…
Honest, it’s not…
I’m not well.
I spent my teens passing out every time I menstruated, pouring blood, throwing up etc and no-one would listen apart from "Oh you just need to go on the pill." Which is
so damned bad for you long term. So I was on the pill for years until I decided to have kids. Oh and as for "It’s normal, you’re female you just have to live with it."
So I took birth control pills for years until I decided to have kids and that was when I stopped taking them and my periods were actually fine, all settled down and no-one had thought to suggest that they might do that and that I could stop filling my body with unnecessary and potentially harmful synthetic hormones.
Then 2 years ago I had a catastrophic period which wouldn’t stop and I had to have a blood transfusion and lots of medication to get it under control. I ended up back on the pill again for a few months but now I was armed with so much more information and was determined to get off it as soon as possible.
I saw a (male) gynae doc and was again told that, I could be offered a hysterectomy, and a microwave ablation of the uterus - I refused both. If we can’t understand it, whip it out, it’s probably not worth having…. Besides, it’s not a penis…. Oh and those nasty female hormones? I can take as many man made ones as I like, they’re perfectly safe and do not ever cause reproductive tumours or other problems….Sheesh, well why is it that I get crippling uterine cramps while taking the pill and never, not ever when I’m not?
So, what’s wrong with me? We don’t know. I suspect it’s menopause, but we’re not even sure this IS my menopause…. Because there’s no bloody test for it that sodding works and because the NHS doesn’t take any sort of baseline for each woman’s hormone levels so has no idea when they’re out of kilter. I’m sure that in the past women wouldn’t have survived this.
That friend of mine Witchy Woo said to me, "You know that "it’s normal, you’re female you just have to live with it" comes from the patriarchal model of medicine, don’t you… "they’re only female - we needn’t even try to understand those things". Same goes for reliable individual tests for menopause."
And she’s so right… As always.. Do they really hate us so much?
When I saw a sceptical doc who refused to believe I was menopausal because I was “too young”, I made him take a blood test. They usually do work. My hormones were off the scale and I was DEFINITELY menopausal. Make yours do a blood test, because I had the same symptoms.
Comment by polly styrene — May 24, 2009 @ 12:31 pm
At the moment my system is flooded with synthetic hormones so the blood tests wouldn’t show anything and my doc is the one that told me that meno symptoms can manifest with only slight changes that aren’t picked up - later on they’ll be so far out of whack that although a blood test would pick them up it’d also be blatantly obvious. It’s the slight changes at the beginning that would be picked up if we had a baseline to work with.
Thankfully I do have a doc that agrees with me that I AM menopausal and also having problems absorbing and retaining iron - which leads to anaemia, which has it’s own issues….
Comment by SharkBait — May 24, 2009 @ 12:45 pm