MY CONTRACEPTIVE JOURNEY + AN UNEXPECTED DIAGNOSIS

Ages ago I asked my Instagram what blogs ya wanted to see and this one came up! Since then I’ve been meaning to get around to it but A. Life and B. Its kind of a LONG story..

I promise I will try and cut a very long story short for you guys..

My journey with contraception started in my high school years when I first went on the Pill to regulate my EXTREMELY irregular period – im talking like id get a period once or twice in a year (NOT amazing).

If I knew what I know now taking the pill to regulate an extremely irregular period is definitely not the answer and was more or less just masking a bigger problem but..

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

So, AVA 30 was my doctors pill of choice for me and that was all well and good. I started on this pill and being a young teenage girl who has absolutely no appreciation for her body nor any awareness as to how amazing it actually is to have a period – I never took the sugar pills.

So of course I never got a period.

Teenage vaids thought this was a sweet deal and this went on for (I hate to say it) maybe 2 years..

2 years down the track It dawned on me “Is it bad to never get your period?”. Despite my doctors claims that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it I wasn’t convinced and this is where I started to do all my own research.

As a teenager ill admit its super hard to navigate this whole period business, I found myself caught up in super conflicting information. I couldn’t work out why books I read were advocating for Aunt flo, while my doctor was telling me it was fine if she only visited twice a year.

Confused vaids therefore made a very uninformed decision to stop the pill and try a different form of contraception – next up was the jadelle – AKA the rod.

This was 2 little rods in my arm which slowly secrete progesterone to prevent you from getting pregnant and of course, not always but in my case, it put yet another hault to my period for two more years. Remember I said I was confused and misinformed…

FAST FORWARD two more years and again I had an epiphany that actually I still wasn’t getting my period and I should probably sort it out once and for all.

I got the rods removed and to finally see what was going on with my body without any hormonal input I opted for the copper IUD which is one of not very many forms of contraception which don’t give you any hormones.

It’s a very small copper device inserted into your uterus and basically they say that sperm is kind of allergic to the copper so they die before they can reach your eggs to fertilize them!

Perfect! No hormones AND no babies - just what I needed!

I, however, have ONE WORD for the insertion process..

TRAUMATIC

This is not to say that any experience you may have, should you be thinking of getting the copper IUD, will haunt you like it did me, everybody is different and there are reasons which I did not know at this stage which may have contributed to it being such a horrific experience.

Aaaaanyyywaaay, so now I’ve got the copper IUD and I’m feeling like a functional woman with all of my own hormones having free reign over my body!

Of course, the return of my period was WHACK. It was like I’d gone backwards to pre-Ava 30 days and my period was ridiculously irregular again, visiting maybe only 3 or 4 times a year now.

This is the issue with contraception. At such a young age we sit through health classes where teachers who have absolutely NO experience with teaching children about sex or contraception other than their own non-existent sex lives (ok harsh but like definitely was true in my situation). They hand out bananas and encourage us to put condoms on them before proceeding to tell kids who cant even remember their lunch everyday that its time to go to the doctor to get “the pill” and don’t forget you need to take it at the same time everyday????

Also, cant forget the cartoon pictures of young teens on the big projector looking sad as anything holding their new born babies – “this could be you”, “condoms are only 90% effective, that’s 10% chance of having a baby like this girl!!”

I’m hoping this is an extreme version and it was only my school that was THIS bad but you get the gist. We are taught from such a young age that hormonal contraception is the only option and that we need to get on it ASAP, regardless of whether your sexually active or not. How many people, like me, went on contraception to ‘regulate their period’ (nonsense), or ‘clear up their skin’ – its like we forget that the bad skin and irregular periods are a completely NORMAL sign of going through puberty and we try anything and everything to fix it and make it go away ASAP. And little do we know the damage we can cause or the issues we just cover up that we will have to deal with later down the track.

Contraception is a band-aid, not a cure.

Now before we carry on, I realize I sound like a complete hormonal contraception Nazi, I assure you I am not, but I do feel veeeeery strongly about letting nature take its course in those early days of puberty.

I realize there are circumstances where this isn’t possible and contraception is a no brainer, but when I have a daughter I hope to encourage her to give her body time to work itself out before allowing her to put any hormones into her body.

Its like the sex hormones in our bodies and just trying to work things out, trying to build these roads that will eventually be like big, busy, functioning highways where everything runs smoothly and our periods will be bang on time + length.

But at the start its like a dirt track, and maybe our hormones haven’t quite nailed the length of the cycle or the regularity yet, but they’re working on it.

If we give our bodies time our hormones can form highways out of the dirt tracks.

We need to not be so impatient with our bodies and remember good things (AKA good highways, AKA GOOD MENSTRUAL CYCLES) take time! Lets stop giving our bodies the hormones / putting in fake, shitty detours to our own roads and highways and lets give ourselves a chance!

Anyway, back to the story..

So, I’ve got my Copper IUD and my periods suck.

This is when I sought out a naturopath to help me with my hormones. I did a hair test and found out I had candida and a lot of other gut issues (I wrote a whole blog on this which you can read here).

We sorted this out and my periods for the FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE were bang on – I shit you not they were regular and just brilliant. There is a massive link between gut health and hormone production which explains part of the reason why with a really imbalanced gut I was having so many issues – if I got into that this blog would need to be a small novel, so perhaps google it..

The changes I made included changes to my diet, I limited the foods I was intolerant to and my diet focused on more wholesome foods. I also supplemented with herbal medicines which assisted and encouraged healthy hormones, along with other organ support (because all our organs work together like one big team and if we’ve got a man down the team isn’t going to do so well).

As time went on things started to get worse again and my cycles began to get longer and longer. The average menstrual cycle is 28 days and mine are more like 50 days, so one period every 2 months. Around this same time one of my smears came back showing I had cell changes, if you have 3 smears showing this you need to have a biopsy to check it isn’t cancer. So this failed smear was my third so I then needed to have the biopsy done, its called a colposcopy.

Fast forward to the colposcopy, I was sitting down with the gynecologist and my mum (bless her) and we were discussing my menstrual history. I explained the issues I have always had with irregular cycles, some pain I experience and a recent hospital admission I had had for a kidney infection VS burst ovarian cyst. At this point in time, to my knowledge I didn’t have cysts on my ovaries, however it had never been looked into. My mum piped up and said she'd had an ovary removed because of burst cysts.

The gynecologist decided to look into it. I had my colposcopy (which was fine, hallelujah) and then he decided to scan my ovaries for cysts – I had 13 on one ovary and none on the other. This finding automatically rang alarm bells and it also gave me one of the 3 required positive findings to be diagnosed with poly-cystic ovaries.

PCOS is strange in that you need to have 3 out of 4 or 5 of the tests they do to be actually diagnosed with poly-cystic ovaries.

I then had blood tests which were not tooooooo bad, but they did correlate with PCOS even if it was only in minor ways. And then my third positive finding was menstrual cycle dysfunction.

Other tests / findings which determine whether someone has PCOS is if they have really bad acne, lots of facial hair or hair where typically females wouldn’t or enlarged ovaries.

So I have PCOS. Minor PCOS, but PCOS nonetheless.

My gynecologist made me get my copper IUD out because these are not good for people with PCOS and actually he felt that the diagnosis of PCOS may explain why I found it so traumatic to get the device inserted.

PCOS explains my menstrual history, and it also explains why when I did the gut program with my naturopath, things improved.

Without being too technical or science-y (this is just a blog afterall), PCOS is actually a issue with insulin resistance, so people with PCOS can be at high risk of going on to develop metabolic syndrome or diabetes. BMI is something they look at in people with PCOS as they really encourage people to keep their BMI within normal ranges as becoming overweight can only heighten these risks.

The diet I was following when doing the gut cleanse was incredibly wholesome and with very little sugar, dairy or gluten, which is an ideal diet for someone with PCOS. In super simple terms you basically start eating like your already a diabetic, so you don’t become one. You eat a low glycemic diet because this encourages more stable blood sugar levels, which you want when you have a degree of insulin resistance.

On top of this the herbal medicines I took were also all very supportive of female hormones, which was also helpful in regulating my cycle and encouraging ovulation!

Fast forward to now and I am still trying to follow this diet to best suit my body. I am also still taking herbal medicines to encourage a regular cycle and ovulation and even reduce the number of cysts on my ovaries! The herbal medicines I take have changed and developed over time as my symptoms and circumstances have changed. I am super careful and aware of this because I 10000% want to have babies one day and PCOS can impact this.

Moral of this story, gals, is listen to your body!

Be aware of your cycle and whats going on and I 100% encourage you to look into things if you feel they aren’t right! Having a period, as inconvenient as it can be at times (Hello period at a festival on new years night I’m looking at you), is such an amazing and beneficial thing for your bod, we were made to reproduce and that’s what periods are all about!

If I had never of looked into all of this for myself, I may have come off hormonal contraception one day when I wanted to have a baby and probably wouldn’t have been able to have one for years due to my whack cycle! Do your future self a favor and look after yourself now!

I plan to do another blog covering all the things I’m doing to support my bod through PCOS, to continue to regulate my cycle and hopefully reverse some of the findings to be a super fertile gal for when I need to be! But, that’s basically my (very long) story of my journey with contraception which led me to a diagnosis of PCOS! I hope this was super insightful and motivates you to delve a little deeper into your own menstrual cycle and sort anything out that isn’t quite right!

Ciao for now,

Vaida