I’ve had a hormone imbalance my entire life. From having pubes at eight and boobs at ten, to heavy periods at eleven. It’s not easy! In fact it can be downright damaging. Often in my pre parenting years my periods would be so heavy and painful I would faint, this happened to me once during a routine visit to the hairdressers and the stylist had to drive me home, thankfully before she’d started chopping my mop. It also happened in McDonald’s!

When I was 9 I went to a kids club where they vilified me for having hairy armpits – kids can be so cruel.

I had to stop taking the combined pill at 20 because I’d started getting migraines. Aside from the physical symptoms of these all consuming body changes I also turned into a sociopathic, hysterical mess for 2 weeks out of every month. In fact sometimes I still do, despite being on a progesterone only contraceptive and not often experiencing the monthly bleeding that comes with periods anymore.

I’ve had days off of work because I’ve been physically sick the day my period arrived, or I’ve had a migraine, cramps so bad I’d feel like I needed to push to expel them. Inflated and excruciatingly painful boobs, have kept me awake for hundreds of nights over the years and my mental health has suffered immensely. I get night sweats too, when I first met Shaun he thought I’d pissed the bed when we woke up to sopping wet sheets during our first holiday together.

There is absolutely nothing glamorous about our cyclical visitor. The chronic fatigue I experience when I’m due on can sometimes leave me in bed for days, never quite managing to sleep enough to shake it off. Then there’s the palpitations and anxiety that will often overwhelm me completely out of the blue, until I check my calendar and realise it might be the time of the month that these little bastard hormones rear their ugly heads. When I got diagnosed with Fibromyalgia the link to hormones was glaringly obvious for me, but my doctor seemed uninterested as they seem every time I mention that my hormones sometimes make me feel like I want to walk in front of a train or punch a stranger in the face.

Let’s not even go there with pregnancy and post partum hormones. Most of you mums will understand how mentally crippling they can be – times that by the fact mine are already tipping the scales and we’re in deep water. I hated mostly everything about carrying my daughter and hormones were to blame for that. Even the SPD I suffered was caused by a hormone.

But I’m not alone. Most of us are so used to accepting that we have shit periods and also that there’s nothing, or very little we can do about it. It’s part and parcel of being the fairer sex. It’s natures way. Suck it up princess, all women get them. That maybe true but not all women get bad ones. I used to find myself secretly hating women who had easy periods. And let’s not forget how men use it as a quip every time they piss us off ‘time of the month is it?’ Jokes that are infuriatingly unfunny. I seem to be no further forward twenty years in, and what are my options? Hysterectomy apparently, but not only is that extreme it comes with its own set of problems.

Whilst writing this and feeling sorry for myself because it’s that time right now, I got to thinking about women in third world countries who really do have it so much worse. They don’t even have the most nominal pain relief. Nor are they saved the embarrassment by Always Ultra when their period starts running down their legs. Not forgetting they don’t even have contraceptives in most of these poverty stricken places. It really is a problem despite the world telling us to get over it.

I’m all for learning alternatives to alleviating hormone imbalances and period problems. I just wish I could provide you with some winning tips, as it’s seems I’m all out of positivity when it comes to uterine shedding. But if you have any of your own tips and tricks for managing your monthly visitor get in touch! I’d be more than happy to test them out!

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