Hormonal - was I ever...

For some reason this blogging mularky is not coming as naturally to me as I expected. My friends will agree that I'm not usually stuck for anything to waffle on about but I've been looking at this blog for a couple of days lost for words.

I want to write what it is to be a woman bleeder but I'm somehow stumped to sum it up. I don't understand what's stopping me. Maybe I just need to start and it will flow - I can certainly think of lots to write in the middle of the night but don't remember a jot of it once I'm sat here during the day and there's no way I'm getting up and typing it at 3a.m. even if I can't sleep. It doesn't help that one of my cats is sat beside me trying to claw my arm off the keyboard - even he's trying to tell me that I've nothing to say...

I'm off work at the moment because I'm having real problems with my periods, my menstruation is mental and I am cursed with the curse. I think you get my gist.

When I started my periods I was 13 and while my mum and I celebrated me 'becoming a woman' (I got out the in-line skates and balloons immediately and lept woah-ing from a plane) we were secretly worried about how they'd be for me. And we were right to worry.

I soon got into a pattern of at least three weeks on, one week off. It was heavy as hell and I was often admitted to hospital for blood transfusions to make up for what I'd lost. We must have been trying to control it with factor injections but at that stage I wasn't on home treatment so every bleed meant a trip to hospital, across Manchester.

Eventually - after years of experimenting with hormone drugs and fun investigations with the casually named Prof Elstein - I was put on hormone treatment doses so high that they stopped my periods all together. By that point I was sooo greatful I would have happily not had another period ever, thank you very much.

After about 15 years of taking the pill continuously I came off it in January last year. This was a decision that was not easy but I felt that after so long being controlled and suppressed my body needed a break. I wasn't concerned about anything specific, cervical cancer, high blood pressure or anything like that because I'd been monitored and had been assured long term hormone therapy wasn't that dangerous but I just wanted to take a break. Was I being foolish??