My daughter's tale rightfully begins many years before her birth, with the tale of fertility in the modern world.
I came to fertility at the age of 13, with no environmental preconceptions about the nature of fertility in the female human body. My mother had a complete hysterectomy when I was two years old, and she and I lived apart from my half-sisters for my entire childhood and growing up years, so, although I had two half-sisters who were more than a decade older than I was, I never lived in the house with a fertile woman. This is important, as there is a school of thought that holds that there is no such thing as "PMS", but that it is all culturally and environmentally induced. I am living proof that this is not an adequate explanation, as I had serious PMS and dysmenorrhea from the outset, without any awareness that this was to be expected. My mother was careful to raise me with no expectation of pain, in an attempt to avoid conditioning me to believe in and create symptoms which were not real.
Despite this background, the arrival of the onset of menarche hit me hard enough to send me to the nurse in my high school, who kept me lying down for some time, then eventually sent me home. I know that this was not standard practice in 1984, and so I have some outside validation of the significance of the pain I felt at the time.
Over the next year or two, I suffered severe abdominal pain, on and off, and continued to have lengthy and seriously uncomfortable cycles. Eventually, after being repeatedly dismissed by my male allopathic family doctor, these symptoms reached the point where I was hospitalized, tested for every sexually transmitted disease known to man, and then when the tests came back negative, my male doctor tested me again - when those results were the same, he simply told my parents that the tests were sometimes wrong.
Fortunately for me, he was off over the weekend when I was in the hospital, and his on-call replacement was a British woman who took a look at my chart, ran more tests, and scheduled me for an exploratory laparoscopic surgery, in which a camera would be inserted into my abdomen to look around and attempt to determine the nature of the problem. This surgery, performed by a sympathetic female gynecological surgeon, revealed that I had been suffering from ovarian cysts, and that I had over a quarter of a cup of clear fluid running around loose in my abdomen from ruptured ovarian cysts. If you hold a quarter-cup measuring cup up against the body of a slight and slender 13-year-old, you will understand why the cysts could cause such pain and problems.
I was put onto the birth control pill, and told that, due to my history of migraines, it would raise my chance of stroke from infinitesimal to minute. Other than that, I was told there were no real concerns, at least compared with the alternative. I continued to have significant dysmenorrhea, and the pain was addressed with a series of increasingly strong analgesics and NSAIDS. Most of them had little to no effect, and during this period I determined that M & Ms had more drug action in my body than ibuprofen, because I was taking 800mg of ibuprofen by prescription, the equivalent of 4 Advil (tm) or Nuprin (tm), and 4 M & Ms would, at least, set off my allergies enough to make me depressed (I'm allergic to chocolate). This was much more effect than I ever had from ibuprofen, for that problem, or any other.
I lived for several years on the Pill; meanwhile, I continued to suffer from problems with ovarian cysts, dysmenorrhea, and PMS so bad that I had a teenage boy cousin keeping track of my cycle by writing "Hell Day" on his personal calendar, every 4th Tuesday. He lived with my family, and apparently his life was so disrupted by my PMS that he actually went to lengths unheard of for a teenage boy, and kept track of the cycle of a female relative.
During this period, I was sexually active, including a period of 3 years with one partner, my steady boyfriend. Since I was on the Pill, he chose not to "diminish his sensation" by "taking a shower in a raincoat" - despite the fact that, as I learned over time, he spent two of those years regularly sleeping with a young woman with a latex allergy and herpes. He was honest with me as long as I tolerated the situation, and lied to me when I stopped, so that I was put in an exceedingly dangerous situation, as I know he was using no barrier protection with either of us - me, because I was on the Pill, and her, because she was allergic to latex, and no other barrier was then available. I consider this willful endangerment, and believe that no person has the right to make decisions which endanger another person to that extent without the informed consent of all affected parties.
The Pill may have served to protect me from pregnancy during this period, though were I not on it, it is likely I would have used barrier contraceptives for any encounters, which would have served the further purpose of protecting me from the exposures, knowing and unknowing, that each partner opened me to. I would have been safer had I done so - as it was, only the grace of those forces responsible for such kind miracles kept me safe from infection with any disease, from the inconvenient to the embarrassing to the deadly. The disservice may have balanced the service it did me.
As you may know from reading elsewhere on this site, shortly after becoming engaged to my husband, I suffered from the acute onset of the symptoms of Chemical Injury, in the form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and all their attendent related illnesses.
In attempting to treat this, I went from the rheumatologist who originally diagnosed me, to the doctor at Harborview Medical Center at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who was conducting a study of the syndrome, and recommended that I find an acupuncturist. I was fortunate, and found an MD in my local area who also practised acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. He became my primary care physician until I moved to Portland, Oregon, and was responsible for introducing me to the Western Herbalist who had practised for 25 years and treated her own Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She introduced me to Bach Flower remedies, lymphatic drainage massage, and the more formalized use of herbs and nutritional supplements.
When I moved to Portland, I first followed her recommendation to a woman who practised primarily using Bach Flower remedies. Then I found myself a new acupuncturist/Chinese Medicine MD, who also introduced me to a doctor from Taiwan who had been practicing Chinese energy medicine for probably 50 years, the last 25 directly, without always using the acupuncture needles or other such techniques, but instead manipulating the energy of the body directly. I also found myself a new chiropractor, and through her recommendation, came to see a Naturopath, which brings us back to the discussion of the history of my own fertility, and the lessons it has taught me.
This Naturopathic Doctor evaluated my health, and my medications, and addressed herself to remedying the hormonal imbalance which was causing my PMS, dysmenorrhea, ovarian cysts, and other problems. Her first concern was with the slew of symptoms I presented which could be attributable to my being on the Pill.
This was the first time that I had really heard such concerns from any health care provider; previously I found that they had a tendency to minimize the warnings presented on the package inserts, assuring me that the benefits to be had far outweighed the risks.
I believe that they were doing the best they knew how to do. I do agree that the Pill has created a radical change in the lot of women, who were previously subject to dangerous levels of overbreeding due to societal and personal pressures to breed, with no control or limitation on fertility; but this has not always been the case.
History clearly shows that the midwives and herbalists of many times and cultures have posessed knowledge of contraceptives, emmenagogues, and abortifacient agents, all of which could be used to protect women from dangerous overbreeding, to the point where their bodies were depleted, their resources strained beyond providing for their offspring, and they were aged before their time and subject to easy death from illness or in one of their many childbirths.
The Pill, to many women, was the only modern alternative to this fate, and was heralded as the blessing any such option would be. Unfortunately, unlike its predecessors, it is not based in plant-sourced phytoestrogens, which act as female hormones within the human body, and can prevent pregnancy, but it is instead created from petroleum-based xenoestrogens, which do not act the same way in the body, or dissipate at the same rate. This difference in source and action causes the Pill to create a range of side effects in the body which can seriously damage the health of the woman using it. This means that it is not the blessing it was thought to be, or at least that the blessing is not unmixed.
In my own case, the Naturopath feared that my use of the Pill for the previous 7 years had seriously aggravated my condition, and was causing some of my problems, and exacerbating others. She took me off of it, and my body reacted strongly. It was like going through a second puberty; my proportions changed, my body developed and shifted its development, and I was subject to major hormonal fluctuations as my body attempted to learn how to regulate its own hormone levels for the first time since shortly after I hit puberty (the first time). My ND tried to balance this shifting hormal tide by using a phytoestrogen, or plant-sourced progesterone in this case, but I was unable to tolerate any substance that affected my hormone levels. This turned out to be significant in understanding my condition, and continues to this day, but at the time it simply meant that I could not tolerate any interference with the natural course of my going through withdrawal from the chemical manipulation of my body's natural regulatory systems.
Those of you who have had to deal with PMS, menopause, pregnancy-related mood swings, or those caused by the Pill, will have some idea of what it was like for us. I had hot flashes, wild variations in my sexual appetite and natural reactiveness, as well as the moisture variations in the mucous membranes - these are common to all hormone variations, and much more unpleasant to experience than to read about. This also prompted me to learn more about the Pill; after all, a huge percentage of the fertile female population were on this drug, not to mention the many more who were on other forms of petroleum-based xenoestrogens, like the estrogen supplements given to post-menopausal women, and male to female transsexuals, or the so-called "fertility drugs", given to stimulate ovulation. What were we doing to our population with these drugs?
My research convinced me that I could never consider going back onto the Pill, as did the improvement that I showed once the withdrawal symptoms subsided. This left me with some serious questions to answer, as we were not sure at that time whether it would be safe for me to have children, and whether I could even do so.
During the summer when I was first going off of the Pill, I used the rhythm method of temperature based fertility charting, combined with barrier contraceptives in the form of latex condoms. This is not completely reliable, as I'm sure you're well aware, and there were several points where I was disrupted in my cycle in a way that caused us to suspect that I was briefly pregnant, conceiving but not implanting. This suspicion was caused by a sudden switch from a reliable 28 day cycle to a 6 week cycle, approximately, followed by an unusually long and hard menstruation.
Telling my mother of this, I learned that she had suffered the same problem during the 2 years prior to my birth, and had come to the same conclusion. She had even gone so far as to seek medical treatment for fertility in order to have me. This, too, was to become significant in my attempt to correlate what I knew of the health problems I have suffered, and form some sort of coherent understanding from such diverse puzzle pieces.
These disruptions were trying emotionally, as well. In the midst of the hormonal disturbances which make emotion a difficult topic to start with, I felt that I was miscarrying repeatedly, and was greatly upset by the experience, wondering if I was even capable of carrying a baby to term. This emotional strain took its toll, and came to a head a few years later.
In October of 1995, during the worst possible time, financially, I missed my period after several years of dependable regularity. My husband had been unemployed, briefly, for a period of two weeks between positions, so this was the only time in years when we had not had medical insurance. We are strong believers in prenatal care, so when the home tests came up positive, and I began showing the physical changes that I remembered from my previous experience with suspected pregnancy, I scheduled an appointment with my obstetrician/gynecologist, or OB/GYN, at the Womens' Clinic where I had been seen for previous routine exams. It was rather imperative, in fact, because my previous intolerance to hormone swings was showing again, and I was throwing up. Constantly. I threw up every 15 minutes to half an hour, round the clock, for a week straight.
When we came in for my exam, my doctor repeated the urine test, and formally confirmed my pregnancy. Given the problems I'd been having with "hyperemesis" (the polite name for my inability to refrain from attempting to invert my digestive tract), she decided to make use of their in-office ultrasound machine, and check out the looks of the pregnancy. This was a turning point - she located the developing placenta, normal for this stage of early pregnancy, but the egg itself had failed to develop. The condition, which I later learned was termed a "blighted ovum", meant that the pregnancy would not progress, and I would miscarry in the natural course of things.
However, I was constantly throwing up, despite the anti-emetics, and it could have been weeks before my body discarded the attempt at conception, and its botched results, in a condition they termed a "missed abortion", in which the body fails to spontaneously abort, or miscarry, at the point where the pregnancy fails, or goes awry. After consulting with me about my available options, it was determined that we should proceed with a Dilation and Curettage, or D&C, the technical name for the procedure used to clean out the uterus and replicate miscarriage. This is also the procedure used in medical abortion, and I can attest to the psychological trauma associated with the procedure, even when there is no chance of a full-term pregnancy, or a baby.
The D&C was scheduled as soon as it could be, and I was to have a general anaesthetic, at my own request. I could not stand the idea of being awake to watch the procedure, and I have a history of resistance to local anaesthetic, and could not bear the idea of it wearing off in the middle of the procedure.
I was in bed for a week recovering; during this time, a very dear friend thought of the one thing that could help, some, and brought me a 3-week-old, just-weaned baby gerbil, to be a companion for me and my older gerbil. That infant came in, walked to the middle of my chest, sat down, and got a very intent look on her face. I said to my husband "If she were a baby, I'd swear she was...", just as the dime-sized yellow puddle formed. For a week, little Lucy (companion to Woodstock) came in each day, sniffed and ran around a bit, and then settled down to piddle in the middle of my chest. She had apparently bonded to me in the way of most baby animals, and was stimulated by the "Mommy scent" of female hormones to react in the same way she would to her own mother. She gave me something small and young to love, and be loved by. My husband held me a lot. And the doctors told me not to risk pregnancy for 6 months, if I wanted to try again.
A couple weeks after the surgery, my family had scheduled a family reunion. I went, having told no one in my family of the pregnancy, or its loss, and I wept in our room between visits with my neices and nephews, who wanted nothing to do with this childless adult they barely knew. In the entire extended weekend, I could not get my youngest nephew, whose mother and I had had due dates a few months apart, though she never knew it, to come close enough to me to be hugged. It was one of the most difficult emotional experiences I have ever been through.
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