This is the Period that Will Not End

Many people warn you that when you go off birth control you might have irregularity in your cycle as your body adjusts back. Since I had only been on the pill for a year and half and the NuvaRing not much longer, I didn’t really expect any changes. Most of my life I’ve stayed out of hospitals, never broken any bones, or had more than the chicken pox, so I take good health for granted (which I know you should not do in this age of rampant cancer). But there it was: my lack of appreciation for the nearly twenty years of regular cycles I’ve had.

July was uneventful, the month I inadvertently went off because I was in Syria and far away from my supply at home in Qatar. When I got home and wasn’t pregnant from my husband’s one week visit, I toyed with the idea of going back on. After all we had talked about October as the time for us to start ‘trying’ as the infamous phrase. This interruption was two months prior to the ‘plan’ which we had agreed on and told the two couples closest to us who were already parents of young ones. But then it happened: I got my period, so there was no real reason to go back on. My body wasn’t as fertile as I had always suspected or my Hindu South Asian parents had feared since adolescence.

A few days of regular behavior, a pause, and then more blood. And more. Into the second week I started to worry; when regular discharge comingled with fibrous tissue I was a little concerned. A few years ago three of my friends all had miscarriages, two of them with their third child. I learned the statistics then: one out of four women has a miscarriage, often without realizing his is happening. They think it’s just a heavier flow – exactly what was happening to me.

My to date excellent health had never sent me to the hospital to check on things many other people would make their first. I kept saying, “If it doesn’t stop tomorrow, I’ll go in.”

And then I realized that it had been fourteen days of this. I got up on Friday morning, the Sunday evivelent in Qatar, and drove myself to the hospital. The male attendant there wanted ot know what I wanted to see the doctor about. Many anywhere else this wouldn’t have been an issue but the fact that I had to wait in the ladies waiting area gave me the subliminal right to refuse him.

“I need to see a doctor,” I repeated three times to his persistent inquires. Finally a female nurse came over to ask me what I wanted checked.

“I’ve had my period for two week straight,” I said.

The nurse and the doctor were both South Asian so we laughed as they ran the tests and let me know that I was not physically or chemically pregnant; I had not, my worst fear, miscarried.

I left the hospital that day and felt sheepish about my previously caviler attitude towards fertility, conception, and parenthood. I did not go back on the birth control.