Jagged Little Pill - Adventures with the oral contraceptive #2

It was the film Limitless that got me thinking about it again. Based on the myth that only 10-20% of the human brain is commonly used, the premise involves a struggling writer overcoming his creative blockages with the help of a pill that allows him to access the brain’s full capacity.

With vastly-enhanced energy and perception heightening his artistic powers, the writer finds he has enough drive and brain power not only to finish his novel, but also quickly to learn languages, make it big with stocks and shares, buy an amazing house and run for political office.

“I was blind but now I see,” says the protagonist as the pill kicks in and the world opens itself up to him in a kaleidoscope of possibilities and scenarios, enabling him to make the right choices and fulfil his potential. However, as with any drug there are undesirable side-effects which, while causing necessary plot complications, serve to create an enjoyable but flawed film undermined by its own ignorance of possibilities with a one-dimensional, self-serving, un-altruistic version of intelligence.

One could hardly regard such a film as water-tight scientific research, but I think we all know that there’s no such thing as the ideal, side-effect-free drug (and perhaps there’s a blessing in that). Nevertheless, Limitless did prompt me to dwell on my own productivity and drive, which always takes a nose-dive 5-6 days before a period. Plagued with inertia more physical than cerebral, I also experience an increasing dread of the event rolling round like a basketball on the edge of a net. The anticipation of an inevitable fall.

I wasn’t hoping for miracles, or even looking for escape - rainbows and flying kittens. I’m not the drug-taking type, never have been. Never having even smoked an ordinary cigarette, I wouldn’t know what to do with a spliff, although yes, I have been known to enjoy a glass of wine or six. But even drinking, as I get older, is becoming more of a chore to me, more likely to make me sleep – and then wake up with a headache – than fuel a riotous night on the town.  Green tea is where it’s at for me now.

What I want is the opposite of escape, to engage in my life energetically and with positivity, to function as I do the rest of the month. Instead I feel sloppy and careless, foggy and unfocused.  And the rapidity of mood shifts is frightening enough in itself. There’s usually a day – a whole day – when my mood is so dark, I become a nest of hissing vipers in the corner of the room. I feel mean and vicious, and to attempt to counteract it is a fight, such a fight. Instead I’ve taken to viewing it as my day and night in the wilderness, and to meditating on it, trying to view it as something separate from the real me who is aware of it passing through.

And that’s even before the red comes. With the shedding of blood, my monthly sacrifice of myself to under-achievement is complete. Because for me, periods aren’t about physical pain, headaches and stomach cramps - stuff I can take a pill for and curl up in bed with a hot water bottle – although I do get those things. The real challenge is that which I can’t take a pill for- invisible, intangible stuff I have to carry around with me as I go about life.

Or can I? What about the pill? The one with the definite article and of which there are over thirty types, of which I’d only tried two. If I could find the right one, perhaps it could have a positive effect. Why not? Millions of women take it – surely it could work for me? Aren’t there some new ones out there now, a new generation with lighter hormonal doses and therefore fewer and less aggressive side-effects?

Having been here before, my reservations were amplified. Previously, it had been too devastating, my attempts to control my monthly symptoms with medication the equivalent of shaking my fist at a hurricane, leaving me on the floor. “Is that the best you can do?” says my regular gentleman caller, who more and more comes to resemble Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. The fact that I was willing to put myself here again is a measure of how desperate I was.

But am I investing too much hope in such a little thing? The pill, almost as small as the punctuation mark which shares the name “period” (an Americanism which still makes me smirk). And like my period, that punctuation mark has the final say, condemning an innocent string of words to a sentence (in my case it’s normally an ellipsis... just to make sure). The best you can do is hope for a semicolon or comma (or should that be coma?) and enjoy the time in between while it lasts.

Unless Yasmin could succeed where Femodene and Microgynon - those crime-fighting cyber heroines, God bless them – had failed. Could she be any match for the Joker? To begin with, it seemed that yes, this pill with a name more suited to a chiffon-clad Moroccan belly-dancer stood a chance. For the first three months my period was lighter, the symptoms noticeably less aggressive and pronounced. And there was no weight-gain.

I was pleased. So pleased, I wanted to try running on my packs of pills and miss out the seven- day pill-free break. I was on holiday and it seemed like a good opportunity, one of those times for which running on packs of pills was made. So I did it. And it worked! No period. Again, I was pleased.

It worked so well, I wanted to do it again and again –and started to dare ask: could this be the start of a period-free life? I continued popping the pills.

But then the red started to come again. The Joker was on his way, finally making his entrance with a nasty headache and nausea in the middle of the night. “I wanted to see what you would do, and you didn’t disappoint.”

Here we were again. Taking the pill was one thing, but running on packs was a challenge too far. I wasn’t going to get rid of him that easily, and when it comes to me and him, you can’t have one without the other. At least not yet. As the Joker says to Batman – repeating the words of some other film whose name I can’t quite recall right now – “You complete me.”

Just like words and punctuation. You might manage a few short maverick punctuation-free clauses, but eventually periods are going to have to come.