 |
| This
was my view on our Spanish holiday earlier this year and whilst it was beautiful.
It would have been so much more fun to be in the water with my family. |
{This is a collaborative post}
I remember being 12 when I headed to the toilet in the Happy Eater restaurant and saw that first flush of pink on the toilet paper. We were there as a family for Sunday lunch and the day wasn’t supposed to be any different to any other, but of course it was. In my mum’s words, ‘I had become a woman’ and on one hand I was very pleased to be growing up but on another I realized it was the start of something.
Not that my
periods presented any problem for me for the first twenty years of having them.
I was very regular, they were never too heavy and I just had a five day bleed.
No, I certainly didn’t realize how lucky I was back then. The problems for me
only started when I had my first child in 2003, after having JJ my periods
returned far quicker than I thought they would considering I was breastfeeding
and they didn’t just come back quicker, they came back much heavier.
Of course
you can take care of the flow with the appropriate sanitary protection but what
I found so hard to deal with was the pain. I can recall a day when I had to
ring into work from my car as I had tried to drive there and I was doubled up
in pain. I got myself to the doctors and asked to see someone and luckily they
fitted me in. Mefanamic acid became my best friend and really did dampen the
pain but each month there were still two or three days with very heavy bleeding
(losing clots too) and almost unbearable pain.
I just learnt
to live with it until I fell pregnant again about three years later. I’m really
not sure why I didn’t seek more help, I just seemed to put up with the heavy
bleeding and the pain, not knowing that I had menorrhagia, or heavy periods, a recognised medical
condition.