rough day

[dragonlady7]

So yesterday I was concerned that I might be getting a cold, and I did wake up with a sore throat at 2 in the morning, but what actually woke me up was the most godawful menstrual cramps I can remember. I staggered out of bed, took some ibuprofen, and went back to bed.
This morning I was in sort of rough shape but figured I'd probably survive. I made it to work, and walking seemed to help a bit while i was doing it, but basically as soon as I stopped moving, my uterus began attempting to claw its way inside-out through my lower back.
It really felt like there were claws, I'm not making that up.
800mg of ibuprofen dulled the claws except that for about four hours it really felt like there was some kind of spike digging through my back right around the top of that pelvis bone back there, which sucked, but at least my uterus didn't hurt.

Instead of cooking dinner, I insisted on going out, and I had steak frites and a pineapple-juice-based cocktail. I felt immediately better, like as soon as I bit into the steak, and I inhaled everything on my plate and felt cured.

Then I got home and sat on the couch and the claws-inside-out thing started up again, so. I'm just going to whine a lot and go to bed early.

I've been lucky lately, this hasn't been happening, and I've thought ah I've finally hit on the right combination of vitamins and today has been a very good lesson that it ain't about vitamins, honey. (I've been taking a lot of vitamins ever since Dude started coming down with whatever he had, weeks ago.)

I've been menstruating since 1990, and I've tried a whole lot of different things, and have had a few thousand (or so, I don't know) women give me helpful tips, and I've settled on the knowledge that nobody fucking knows shit about why any of this sucks as much as it does. So many of these tips always wind up coming across as so virtue-related, too. "Well, I've found that using only natural products helps me." "I find that if I abstain from NSAIDS I feel better in the long run!" "I try to cut down on the salt in my diet." "I try to live my life as purely as I can." "If I avoid any plastic in my menstrual products I find that helps a lot." "I cut out dairy/gluten/animal protein/ all refined sugars / anything with flavor from my diet and only eat pure foods." "I take these expensive and extremely intense yoga classes." "Crossfit!" "Healthful eating!" Yes I've even had women tell me they lost weight to help with cramps, holy shit, there is nothing they won't try to convince you being thin doesn't help with. I know nobody means to sound like that but it always winds up like that. (Precisely one of those was fake, previously; the rest were all absolutely genuine things I've been told, if not worded as precise quotes.)
Which is, yes, me being cranky and saying, if you were thinking of leaving a helpful tip in the comments, now is not a good time, because I am already doing what I can and at the moment that is not very much.
(I admit, I know one of my major triggers for menstrual pain is using anything that's inserted-- tampons or menstrual cups-- and yet if I don't, I'll be in a world of hurt from chafing in no time flat, so really, it's all a balancing act. I don't get to choose not to hurt, I just choose the most likely vector of it at any given moment.)

Comments

[krait]

Pfft, I have heard most of those as well! And lots of "avoid caffeine, it makes your cramps worse!" said with such a you bring this upon yourself, really tone to it. (Okay but would you like to experience me in pain WITHOUT caffeine?! No, you would not. Also caffeine aids the effectiveness of some pain relievers and you bet your bloody ovaries I am taking painkillers, so there.)

The one cure I most want to apply is the one that is a) guaranteed to work, and b) totally out of my reach, by which I mean a hysterectomy. D:<

[dragonlady7]

>you bring this upon yourself, really

THAT'S IT, that's the thing that SUCKS about menstrual advice. It's everything bad about feminine "solidarity" all summed up in one.

I will NEVER forget one particularly sanctimonious facebook friend telling me that her cramps had eased considerably once she'd started using reusable cloth pads instead of those terrible chemical-laden plastic ones, and I was like, "I've owned a set of cloth pads for four years and am using them right this moment so it's safe to say that's not a factor for me". It was a sweet moment but did not help me, in the end.

(The other one that is like, seared into my memory, is someone who told me that if she took NSAIDS for one period, it would make the NEXT one worse, so she'd toughed it out and gradually her symptoms had eased. How the FUCK would you POSSIBLY be able to correlate something over such a long span of time? How the FUCK is your uterus going to REMEMBER whether you took an unrelated pill twenty-eight days ago??? This advice is just "a random thing that I can't possibly corroborate in any way happened to me and I'm passing it along to you and the nature of it means you can't corroborate it either, so I'm just encouraging you to forego the number one most basic medical intervention recommended universally for this extremely common condition and torture yourself in the hopes of being rewarded mystically for your stoicism at some distant future point." But it meant that FOR YEARS I hesitated to take an ibuprofen when I was crying in pain!!! Amazing.)

[krait]

It really is bizarrely sanctimonious. People seem to just completely lose all logic and reason when menstruation comes up, and instead substitute vast quantities of Wild Mass Guessing and even Outright Woo.

I get especially incensed at those ~live purely~ evangelists who have time to hand-weave their own menstrual products out of wild-caught spidersilk and organic bamboo, or whatever it is that 'living purely' entails this week.

Don't have any caffeine, don't have sweets, don't use manmade fibres or eat processed food or take modern drugs or sit in odd positions, exercise but not too much, eat this but not that, take these vitamins, cut broad categories of food out of your diet, and above all avoid stress!

What I get from this bunkum is that I'm supposed to cease existing for five days a month, or at least cease being a human being. ...Frankly I think that is their point, deep down, but I don't believe they know they're admitting it.

[rmc28]

My helpful tip is to take all the painkillers you safely can. And if hot pads or chocolate or steak or whatever helps, do more of that.

(And I know it's not that easy: I vividly remember days where I have balanced "groggy from painkillers" against "stupid with pain". And I practically had to beg my doctor for the good painkillers, and I'm not sure I'd get them now because they're all worried about potential for addiction and my rather scathing "yes, not being in pain is very addicting" would probably get misinterpreted.)

[dragonlady7]

Agh, my issue is that this only happens occasionally. Most of the time, I have a few bad hours per period, and am cranky; sometimes, I don't even have that, I might have a pinch of a cramp or two, especially when I insert a menstrual cup, but apart from that, nothing. And then every few months I'll just have an awful one.
But that means I'm not going to get anything prescribed, so.
I should be grateful, and I am, for the good ones, I really try to take time to be glad about them, but it almost makes it harder because I don't know what to expect, and sometimes it means I just tough it out because I keep expecting it'll stop and so I don't do even any basic self-care stuff. So. Shrug. Ugh.

I'm sorry yours are so bad.

[rmc28]

*looks shifty* I have found a contraceptive I don't hate that causes my body to menstruate very very rarely, and I would use it entirely for that even if I never had PIV sex again in my life.

But yeah, my teen years, and the trying for my two children, were NO FUN whatsoever. (It was during the trying for second child that I was begging doctors for drugs etc.)

I read something absolutely infuriating recently about the dismissal of women's pain, and menstrual pain specifically. So er, if you want to be annoyed / validated, read it, but don't feel obliged if you don't need any more sources of annoyance right now.

[unicornduke]

I'm on the good NSIADS (however you spell it) and birth control and I still end up in sore-ouchy-land. My period starts and I just drug myself up because that's the only way to get through it. Fuck those people. You do what you gotta do.

[dragonlady7]

I just never know, because sometimes I don't even realize it's come until I've destroyed my clothes since I had nary a single cramp, and sometimes I am cramping in dread for days before anything happens, and sometimes I just go on and live my life and nothing is particularly bothersome, and sometimes it is incapacitating and I can't think, and sometimes it hurts for days and sometimes I have one single bad hour, and I have spent three decades, mostly, chasing after the good ones to try to figure out what it is that I did to deserve them. And the answer is, nothing, there are too many variables for me to isolate. Sometimes I have a bad time, and sometimes I don't, and I should be grateful when it goes well but I can't expect it and I certainly can't expect to summon it on command.

[unicornduke]

that really really sucks. I'd say the best way is to track it but like, I tracked my food for a month and couldn't keep it going any longer so a tracking of sleep and symptoms and everything else happening in your life sounds basically impossible for anyone.

The only reason I even have a complete picture on symptoms is because my period now comes on wednesdays every time and I've figured out my symptoms start the friday before. A full five days before I start bleeding!

I still can't believe how little we know and how much doctors mostly just shrug and say if you can function, then you're doing fine and don't need anything else to happen.

[dragonlady7]

Yeah-- and if it were consistently debilitating, I'd have incentive to track things, but since like two times out of three it's not really anything that affects my life, I'm never going to be able to form that habit.

It's not like anyone's ever going to do a study, girl shit is icky and you get cooties like that. Anyway it's just the punishment of Eve so suffer and like it, filthy creature. (ARGHHH.)

[oracne]

I am on birth control pills nonstop, and I AM NOT AT ALL SORRY. Re: chafing from napkins, I used to use the flannel pads, with one of the plastic-lined ones underneath for leaks (where it wouldn't touch my tender skin). It was messy to deal with, which I know some people do not want; I kind of enjoyed having them soaking in a plastic bucket of water, looking like Lady Macbeth had been by.

[shy_magpie]

I just started doing that! My google skills have a mysterious gap when it comes to getting anything useful about menstrual/"women's health" issues, do you know of where I could find out if there are any side effects to watch out for?

[dragonlady7]

I find the flannel ones to be even worse for chafing!! I hate and resent the plastic ones but the flannel ones somehow wind up like goddamn sandpaper.
I usually have to wear them anyway, not to be gross but the menstrual cup catches all the blood but seems to let, like, other fluids through, which don't stain but are still unpleasant. I have no idea what the various components really are and I bet it's not really been researched so I can't even Google around for it and honestly, I just don't want to know.

I have only ever had terrible emotional reactions to birth control so I don't use it anymore, and I don't want to go through psychosis just to ease my cramps. The thing that's ... I mean, I should be grateful for it, I suppose, but like, every third period is basically pain-free, and then the other two are either Moderate to Hell, and I have spent the last almost thirty years ascribing the relative severity of them to all KINDS of things that I have done that were advice helpfully given me, and I'm realizing that NO, it is RANDOM, and if it's in relation to anything it is in too complex a relation for me to puzzle out with my sample size of a distracted One! This is the kind of thing it takes batteries of scientists years to really determine, and I am not several batteries of scientists with thousands of double-blind participants so I am going to stop beating myself up over how variable the fucking thing is, and just admit that IT IS RANDOM and I CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE for overseeing my own health to that degree; I just don't have enough information and can't possibly.

[lydy]

Oh, gods, I am so sorry! I just found out I'm menopausal, and I seriously thought about throwing a party. (I didn't know until they did the hormone test because I've been using the Mirena IUD for about 10 years, and it made my periods and the attendant cramps, go away.) I did successfully argue for a prescription of ACC for my menstrual cramps, at once point. Bitch only gave m 6 total pills, and I was pissed, but honestly, I used them very rarely, and that plus some Canadian Tylenol 3 got me through until I started using the Mirena. Mind you, codeine makes me stupid, but when I'm in that much pain, I'm already pretty damn stupid. Have you heard that Viagra can also alleviate menstrual pain? And that they didn't bother to research it because, you know, who cares about menstrual pain. (This is my bitey face. Gods, I hate male researchers, some days.)

At any rate, I hope you find something that works for you. It took me so many years to find something that worked for me, and so many doctors who just didn't think it was a deal.

[hyperion_swan]

"I try to live my life as purely as I can." - insert ugly laughter here; golly it's really something reading through these and the ones in the comments on this post