TMI

When I was 15, I lost my period for a year.

It was great! No bothering with feminine products or the potential for embarrassing mishaps.

Talking about personal stuff didn’t happen much in my mother-daughter relationship. It wasn’t until my mom remarked one day about how odd it was that I hadn’t asked her to buy anything at the store for my period that she learned anything about my situation.

“What??” she exclaimed. “You haven’t had your period for a year?!”

Before I knew it, she was whisking me off to a doctor’s appointment. After a brief conversation with him, I was asked to lower my pants so he could inject a gigantic syringe of viscous, light-yellow fluid into my bun cheek. Kind of like new motor oil.

There was little talk about anything. I had no idea what that fluid was. I didn’t ask, either. It was for the best.

A week or two later, I got on the scale. I was a typical teenage girl at the time, exposed to gobs of magazines adorning grocery-store racks showing fit, slightly athletic, scantily-clad models in swimsuits. I perused Muscle & Fitness now and then, always fascinated by the human physique. I subscribed to Shape. I did Jane Fonda workouts in PE when our class wasn’t training to run our fastest mile. I’d stay up late doing workouts at home, too, whenever I’d make dessert and eat more than I thought I should.

I did a Varsity sport every season – volleyball, basketball, and softball, and even joined the boys’ soccer team for fun one year when a girlfriend of mine suggested we go for it since there wasn’t a girls’ team. I biked when I got home from practice and on the weekends, riding trails along the ocean in the serenity of our beautiful little California town.

It sounds like a lot when I write it, but I wasn’t a fanatic. I didn’t go to the kinds of extremes that girls around me did. I liked sports for social reasons. I tried my best at them, too, but I was no phenom. I liked being active, but I wasn’t exercising to try to be model-skinny or underweight, nor was I running myself ragged. I was just having fun in life.

When I got on that scale, my usual 117-pound frame was no longer resting around the same black mark. I wasn’t the type to gain and lose weight. I was steady Eddie; well, Edee. Not so anymore.

For the next several weeks, with no change to how I ate or exercised, my weight continued to climb steadily higher. It was downright scary.

When it finally stopped, I was 132. I know you’re thinking, “Oh, come on, how can you complain about that weight?!” Well, when you’ve just added 13% more bulk onto your frame in the blink of an eye, without having done anything differently except getting an injection, it’s a real bummer for a teenager.

I got my period back too.

I’ve hovered around that weight ever since. I don’t really think much about it today. And my period has been relatively steady and predictable – about every 28 days, light, and fairly easy – no migraines, no haywire mood swings, very little discomfort.

I’m quite thankful, as I was able to bear two healthy children.

About a year ago, I bought my son’s iPhone for the camera, and I also started tracking my period on it just for fun. I like graphs and statistics. Several months ago, my period didn’t come around the same time. I went about 66 days without it. A normal month went by, then another 60-day stint happened.

While visiting Dr. Shu for acupuncture for my back, I happened to mention some other things to him, like the lifetime inability to breathe through my nose. I’ve written about having immediate back pain relief, canceling my neurosurgery appointment, and a new-found excitement about breathing through my nose, thanks to him, but this is the first I’ve written about my period.

I thought you needed to hear this too.

My period is back on track; much heavier than it’s ever been, actually.

If you were feeling squeamish about this female stuff in the previous paragraphs, hold on – the information is about to get a little more intense.

I figure half the adult population between 12 and 55 deals with fairly voluminous amounts of blood every month, and the other half is either married or related to those women. Whether talk of this is out in the open or not, it’s happening all around us nonetheless. Get on an elevator with four women of childbearing age, and the odds are that at least one of them is dealing with the release of blood. (Twenty-eight days is four weeks. A period lasts roughly one week. Take four women, and chances are that one is probably menstruating.) She’s just not announcing it.

When a woman is not dealing with blood, there are other things she’s dealing with throughout the month. Namely, discharge. It’s a topic no one ever talks about, but it’s happening all around us too. I don’t blame anyone for its omission in daily dialogue, but I have a good reason for bringing it up that has nothing to do with shock value.

The color and texture of discharge changes during the month. Biologically, discharge is really important. When it’s clear and stringy, which happens in the days after a period, a woman is ovulating. This fluid is miraculous, really. It has superhero slime qualities that would make a slug green with envy. It could win science awards for surface tension and tensile strength. Surely, its uses by NASA would be endless if it were the kind of thing anyone ever talked about. Maybe NASA talks about it? (If this sounds familiar, I’m quoting myself in this paragraph from a post from three years ago called Period.)

Aside from having lubricant properties, it gives sperm a liquid channel through which to swim, from where they are deposited to the egg they aim to reach.

I say all of this because there are important functions happening in other parts of the body too. What if you’re stuck for 66 days in this ovulation phase? Not only are you secreting a clear, stringy discharge for 9-10 weeks instead of 3-4 days, you’re wondering if your hormones are on pause, repeating other physical and emotional functions that aren’t meant to happen for two months straight.

After seeing Dr. Shu and having my cycle – and therefore my hormonal structure – back on a predictable track, I wonder how many ailments we are medically treating with measures that are unnecessarily dramatic. Like the motor oil solution mentioned above. Had my family known anything about acupuncture long ago – and had someone to visit with Dr. Shu’s knowledge and skill – perhaps I could have avoided that injection.

I hope that in being a little overly candid here, you, too, will benefit from the acupuncture I received. When you think your body is stuck in some dis-ease, remember that you might only be one non-invasive treatment away from restoration.

It’s happily daunting to cancel surgery, breathe through my nose all the time, and have my hormones set straight. When you have breaks in life that feel like downright miracles, you can’t help but shout it from the rooftops.

For more information on Dr. Shu, click here.