The way I see it this story is about my my reproductive health and heavy menstruation. I always had my period every 21 days since it began for me at age 14. Sixteen times a year I ovulated and lost the lining of my uterus, so many times a year I suffered from terrible cramps, crying in the night. At the suggestion of different OB/Gyns at various ages, I took different birth control pills, some making me regulate to 28 days and have lighter periods, some making me stop bleeding altogether. When I got pregnant with my children and started menstruating again after they were born, my cycle relaxed for a bit. My hormones relaxed with the cycles and I felt the ease of being regular and the ease of motherhood. When my oldest child was about 7, I began to have my periods at 21 days again. Then I began to have such heavy periods that I could not leave my house for about 2 days of the cycle. I bled through tampons and the largest sanitary pads available. I bled through my clothing on to sofas and chairs.
Perhaps it is about me not feeling like I am heard. At age 35, my family and I were driving on this journey of many, many hours of flat land and nothing to see. I knew that I needed to change my pads. We were driving with others in a small caravan, no cell service available so he refused to stop. There I sat bleeding and crying quietly for hours. When we arrived at a service station, I wrapped a beach towel around my whole body and waited in the line with many women at the rest room, feeling uncomfortable as I kept them waiting, peeling layer after layer of bright red blood-stained clothing from my body. The car seat was soaked. On the next leg of the trip I had to sit on the towel. Even my t shirt had begun to get wet. When we got home to Buenos Aires, my housekeeper saw the car and cleaned the seat for me, saying nothing just doing it. She washed my jeans and in a sense knew exactly what happened.
It might be in part about my lack of ability to stand up for myself when something is urgent. The inability to tell my control freak husband to stop the car and I would take care of it on the side of the highway, rather than ruin the car which we were borrowing from a friend. It might be in part that he has no respect for his family’s physical needs as I recall him not stopping for my daughter to go to the restroom and finally she peed her pants while running into the gas station. I might be in part that I was finally learning to tell someone that no matter what, if someone tells you it’s an urgent, it really is. I went to the doctor two times and they said it would pass. It might be in part that when we moved home I finally went to the doctor when this nightmarish heavy period was occurring so they could see what I was going through and help me. I got put on heavy iron supplements and a good birth control pill to help with the cycle and my depression and anxiety eased up. I had no idea that anemia was linked with depression.
It might too be about me in my teens, twenties and thirties and my inability to call for help when I was having clearly urgent symptoms but again the impossibly inane relations and health care professionals who did not help. Just like my injury when I was a girl and my other mood disorders, I have to have a complete and utter meltdown to get the help I require. It’s not convenient to stop on the Panamericana highway in the middle of Argentina. Is it convenient to bleed all over oneself? It’s not convenient to listen to the symptoms of a person who might be ill and actually treat her? It’s not convenient to test her blood for iron levels when this had been going on for 8 months?
Inevitably though as I set to tell what happened, the telling is also about a person incapable of getting the help she needs and relying on others to help her when they are often incapable. The telling is also about a person who not only needs to find her voice and tell the truth but who needs to shout it from the mountaintops. If not from the mountaintops, then from the storytelling: I am human and I need help.
My demands are simple enough: I live in 2019 in the western world with the best medicine available and I need help. I am depressed and anxious and I need help. I am not feeling well and I need help. I’m sad and today and I need help. My head hurts today and I need help.
