No, this isn't going to be a post about how I hate being fat because that's a whole separate issue. Instead, I'm going to bitch about how my body isn't normal, but in a weird way, it is.
Just like every normal teenage girl, I started my first menstrual cycle when I was 13 - it was New Year's 1991, I was in 8th grade. Every month, I had my monthly visit from Aunt Flo, always worrying about the big ol' pad making me look like I was wearing a diaper or had "diaper butt". Not until I was a junior in high school did I get to try using tampons, wow what a difference that made in my life! I remembered hating to get my cycle, little did I know then that when I was older, I would hate NOT getting it.
It all changed in March 1996. After a medical procedure, my cycles were never the same. I didn't care, it wasn't really that big of a deal not to get it. I slowly started putting on weight and becoming sedentary, which also led to not having my monthly cycle. But then there came a time when I DID want it to come, I wanted to make sure my body was working normally so that I could bring a child into this world.
Sometime in 2000 I was diagnosed with secondary amenorrhea, which occurs when a woman who has been having normal menstrual cycles stops getting her periods for 6 or more months. I went months, even years without a normal cycle. Dr. Cole gave me a prescription for 5 days of Provera, which would "jumpstart" my cycle through withdrawal bleeding. I've done that 3 times in 10 years. He never really said it but we both knew I needed to lose weight in hopes my body would function correctly.
August 2008 I started to really keep track of when I would get cycles, I starting "charting". Since August 2008, I have had 19 cycles. That is crazy! A "normal" cycle is 28 days and so a "normal" woman would have 12 cycles each year. Obviously, I am not "normal". My cycles, without any medical interruptions, lasted up to 160 days - that's like 6 months! Now wait, I wasn't bleeding that long, that's how long it was in between. In 2009, I decided to go on bcp to regulate my cycles and that worked great but hello, I want to get pregnant and bcp is to prevent that. So December 2010 I decided NOT to continue bcp. December 12, 2010 was my last bcp. Since then, I've had 3 cycles ... in 5 months. UGH
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