The Little Blue Pills Are My Friends

[marydell]

[archive transplanted from my old blog]

Ortho-Tricyclin is an oral contraceptive pill that comes in four colors.  Palest blue for the first week, a little darker for the second week, true blue for the third. Each week it's a little bit stronger, until the end of the cycle.  The fourth week's pills are an unpleasant olive green and contain no active ingredients.  If I make it that far I'll throw the green ones away, once a day, rather than taking them.  I'm ok taking hormones that make me what can only be described as "sick," but I won't subject my system to the possible bad things found in an inert green tablet.  Striking a blow for natural living!

I'm not taking the pill because I don't want a baby.  I desperately want a baby.  But my body isn't playing along, even a little bit, so my route to parenthood will be adoption.  Meanwhile the pill should eliminate the cramps that routinely knock four potentially useful days clear out of my monthly calendar.  The alternative is to take Lupron for 6 months, to duplicate the always-popular menopause experience, and then go back off it, in the slim hopes that I'll have a year or so of reduced pain and improved fertility once my cycles come back online.  Then I can get back to the soul-crushing grind of trying to conceive, and hope I don't lose the theoretical pregnancy to one of the other risk factors I'm rocking.  Ducky.

So, I'm taking a different path to motherhood.  And, having decided that, I'm finally free to take the pill to treat my cramps.  I'm in the third week.  Last week I was so queasy I missed a day of work.  I switched to taking it with dinner instead of in the morning.  I figure, if it's going to make me sick for 8 or 12 hours after I take it, I can just make sure I'm sleeping when that happens.  So far, that seems to help.  It's made my allergies a little stronger -- nothing dramatic, just enough that I sneeze a lot and wake up with a headache most mornings.  Supposedly, it gets better after the first month.  Even if it doesn't, I'm willing to be a little unwell for most of the month, if it means I can skip the killer cramps.  It's got to be healthier than taking Vicodin and Advil at the same damn time, which is what I'd been resorting to the past couple of months.

A friend of mine was on the pill for a while but switched to Depo. 

me: Is it true it can kill your sex drive?

friend: YES.  in fact, that is the true contraceptive effect of the pill.  There's probably not really any hormones in there or anything.

me: But I also heard that exercising can help you get it back...

friend: See, that wouldn't work for me because I want to exercise even less than I want to have sex!

We'll see how it goes.