Tails by the Foxfire

The State of Women’s Health, PCOS, and What a 40-Day Period Looks Like

It’s no secret (and certainly an understatement) to say that women’s health is… kind of a mess: a fact I’ve become personally familiar with since my PCOS diagnosis back in November. I’ve suffered from heavy periods that have routinely made me feel weak and ill once a month since the age of about 12, and in my travels, I’ve had it shrugged off as anemia and had no further testing pursued until I pushed for it in my 30s when other symptoms surfaced. I’ve heard of people waiting a year for a gynecologist, listened to women who were refused transvaginal ultrasounds because they were virgins, had members of my family turned away for birth control or misinformed about endometriosis testing, or just plain told to ‘lose weight despite working jobs that keep them on their feet all day. I myself have been told, ‘just eat less’ with no further questioning about my current eating or lifestyle habits’ because the outdated BMI system suggested I was slightly overweight based on my height. This was back in my twenties when I was around 154 pounds or so as a 5’7 young woman, and impacted my relationship with food going forward. I would read nutritional labels without fully understanding them, talking myself out of what I could and couldn’t eat based on number size rather than what those values really meant. I interrogated every meal, every treat, and ate with a voice in the back of my head fretting it was all ‘making me fat’ without considering that my body was just changing as I got older, and that maybe that’s just a natural part of living. Even now, PCOS diagnosis secured, I find myself feeling self-conscious. Looking at old pictures of myself feels painful, because I miss the body I recognise as my own and feel lost in my own skin unless I’m the one holding the camera. My self-identity is a funhouse mirror that seems to shift depending on the angle or which image I’m looking at, but I’m trying to live with a little more grace for myself. It just takes work, patience, and acceptance.

Then there’s the pill, that fix-all touted as a shiny cure for bad skin and irregular periods by regulating your estrogen and progesterone levels, though nobody mentions the trade-offs for those of us who don’t vibe with it: depressive episodes where you can just about muster the strength to stare at the ceiling and wonder if anyone would notice if you just stopped breathing (they would), or if they’d be better off for it (they wouldn’t); hopelessness, ballooning weight, irritability, a dried-up sex drive, deadened sensation, and the complete loss of self. If you’re lucky, you figure that out before it damages your relationships. I stopped taking the pill at the top of this year when my husband got his vasectomy, and it’s been bittersweet to feel my old self returning, more vibrant and confident for her time away. Sweet for the recovery, but bitter because she left a hole in my life that I didn’t even fully understand until she was back; bitter because, with the scare of months of skipped periods followed by a bleed lasting close to 40 days and counting, I’m afraid I’ll have to put my true self under again to save the both of us.

And to think, I’m one of the lucky ones. Because though those excessive waiting lists exist, I’ve only been nipped by it rather than fully bitten. My current family doctor is a wonderfully generous friend of the family who looks after me despite her stacked deck of patients, and who considers my input and feelings when discussing with me what our best next steps look like. Unlike the nurse I talked to when I lived in England, she doesn’t jump straight to BMI and operate only on that; she considers factors in my life like my current stress levels instead. She listens to me when I say, ‘I’m not myself on the pill and it scares me’, and it’s our last resort, but looking more likely. Still, we’re doing our due diligence, we’re checking out an ultrasound and blood tests again, because there might be something there that can help us. Truly, I count my blessings that I’ve got her in my corner, because a lot of women don’t have that kind of champion to turn to when the fight with their health feels impossible. They get told what to do, if they’re not handwaved out the office door as overweight, too dramatic and/or too emotional, and the mentality is they can take it or leave it. The puzzle’s too hard, and medical science just doesn’t feel willing to figure it out.

But even with my dream doctor, the shortage of doctors in my area means pinning down an appointment with her has me waiting about a month. That’s a month of sleeping on a towel and waking up to blood pouring out of you when you stand up, or freezing in horror when a clot the size of a golf ball out of your pant leg; it means the frequent feeling of liquid leaving your body without your control, stained panties and jeans, and blood running down your legs while you stagger from point A to point B and hoping to everything holy you haven’t left a trail of your insides all over the house. Grisly, certainly, but it’s important you know exactly how severe these issues were; if not to check your own health if you’ve been going through something similar, then to understand where I’m coming from when I get to how vital Pokopia was to my recovery, and to appreciate just how hard it is out there for those of us with periods that feel like they’re actively trying to destroy us. On more than one occasion, I was pretty sure I was going to have to go to the hospital for blood loss.

Again, I’m a lucky one: I work remotely, so at least I didn’t have to contend with this, a commute, and navigating a bustling office full of people. The grind doesn’t just stop, after all; not if you’re one of the breadwinners standing between your family and an empty fridge or an eviction notice. Thanks to remote work, I could curl up with my heating pad and blanket, and push through the physical fatigue and brain fog by coaxing myself to do ‘just one more meeting’, ‘just one more paragraph’, without losing time off work and adding on the stress of how I was going to make rent. I also had support from people like my husband and our friends who lent a sympathetic ear or helped me figure out making food when the raw, persistent ache was too much for me to even consider cooking anything. Some days, even wanting food was tough enough. Truly, I can’t imagine how people who were forced back to the office or who work other in-person jobs make it through without a place to curl up and hide while waiting for the storm to subside. Even at home, it took all my strength to weather it. The world may not throw you a parade, but you’ve got my salute.