Pills ‘n’ thrills ‘n’ bellyaches: adventures with the oral contraceptive #3

When I was 14 I sought the school nurse in desperation as I wanted to ask her advice on taking the pill. Not for contraceptive reasons – I wasn’t interested in sex then. What I wanted was something for PMT, and I’d heard it could help relieve symptoms.

“Well, you could try it,” she said. “But you’ll get a big bum and a beard.”

I don’t know if she was trying to put me off, but she did. Thinking about it now reminds me of Jo Brand’s remark: “I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone... So that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.” However, all women are different and when I eventually plucked up the courage to try a pill many years later, it wasn’t the case for me.

Twenty-four years later, as it happens. In that time pills have changed and hormonal doses are lighter. Five months on Yasmin and there was no weight gained, and no beard either.

Neither did I get any of the other possible side effects mentioned in the leaflets and little booklets that come with the pills - migraine, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, pain or swelling in the leg, blood clots...

In terms of achieving my main objective – to relieve PMT – Yasmin worked well. Symptoms were still there, but less intense and more manageable. They didn’t last for so long – two or three days at most – which, compared with the usual week- long build-up, was a real relief. It’s not so much the period itself which is the problem but the run-up to it, knowing it’s coming, getting closer. Strange emotions - anticipation and dread – get more intense. Even terror isn’t too strong a word.

Dread of what? The low mood, the darkness, pitch blackness. It’s heavy and gritty and resolute, like being hit by a falling anvil from a cartoon. It’s rigid, like being buried in coal, and it won’t move, no matter what you tell yourself. Common sense just doesn’t work.

On Yasmin, I’d still get anxious but not as depressed. It also helped that my period was lighter and lasted for fewer days, and I was also less tired. Placebo? Who knows – and who cares? It was working.

So what was not to like?

What the school nurse didn’t mention – and what no one ever mentions – are brown marks on the skin. I had a brown mark on the side of my face, like a large round freckle a centimetre in diameter. It was there before I took Yasmin, but it wasn’t a birth mark. The first time I noticed it was in 2009, although I can’t remember when it first appeared.

This one wasn’t caused by the pill, and I don’t know what caused it – maybe age or not enough sun (I’m quite pale), or maybe just female hormones in general. Brown marks on the skin are not necessarily related to the pill, but I’d noticed another brown patch developing on the other side of my face.

So I did a thing which you’re not really supposed to do in matter such as this, but which we all do anyway. Just as a first point of call, not wanting to bother the doctor. I turned to Google, and typed in the fateful question.

“Why have I got brown patches on my face?”

The response was fairly unanimous. “Brown patches are formed over facial skin due to use of oral contraceptive pills...” “Brown patches occur quite commonly in women taking oral contraceptives.” Some online discussions linked brown facial patches directly to Yasmin, although other contraceptive pills were also mentioned.

I’d never intended to take the pill indefinitely; I think I respect my period too much.  Although I was interested to see if temporary respite was possible, and for those fab five months, it had been.

But I didn’t want any more brown marks on my face; two was enough. So I did another silly thing, a thing which if I’d known, I wouldn’t have done. I’d have seen the pack I was in the middle of through to the end and finished with the seven day break.

But I didn’t. I stopped there and then – although to be fair, I did consult the booklet, which clearly states that “You can stop taking Yasmin whenever you want.”

Not a good idea for me. What followed was like my usual PMT x 10: a severe withdrawal characterised by a swift and hard fall, the speed and depth of which amazed me.

“Is this a downer?” I couldn’t help asking myself (I’m not experienced about drugs enough to know). For it seemed like the downer of all downers, worse than any PMT darkness I’d evener experienced. Usually I get a tingle or some sign, a feeling of instability, like the ground slowly slipping away from me. But this was more of a whoosh.

I’d entered a place so dark there was a luminosity to it, a sheen glistening like raw meat with flies and maggots around it. A place where I wasn’t only not fully present, but half of myself – the dark half. My body, mind and spirit had been squeezed into a tightness with no room for manoeuvre. Speech and thought was restricted with a negativity beyond cynicism, a meanness which bordered on malevolence. I felt contorted and angular, twisted and bitter.

This violent defiance also manifested itself in a rabid hunger, a desire to eat so great I caused much amusement and astonishment while out for dinner with my husband and two friends, all of whose fajitas I finished off (they couldn’t eat all theirs and didn’t want them, although I wouldn’t have put it past myself to just help myself)... It was as if my body had come back at me with a vengeance, or that dark, devastating id-part of myself was coming up for air. It lasted for about 5 days, and exhausted me.

This is the first month since then, and my period is almost due. It’s been interesting to take a break and fall back into my natural rhythm, as opposed to imposing an artificial rhythm on my body.

Now it’s time to go with the flow for a while.