Me vs. The Pill

Before I begin I'd like to say it’s been a fruitful week in my little village on The Island, my congratulations go out to Panda and to Suz!

As I waffle and struggle with my body and my emotions on my current situation, here’s my sad little story.

At 18 I decided it was time to join the ranks of the cool kids who went all the way and got a Rx for BCPs. I took the first one in the morning and went about my day with a smug smile on my face, feeling so grown up. The next morning I woke up early and had to pee. I jumped out of bed and had that woozy feeling like I got up too fast. Steadying myself I walked the ten steps to the bathroom and, upon arrival, lost consciousness. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor looking up at my mother standing over me with a look of horror on her face. What happened?, I asked. You had a seizure, she said.

WHAT DID YOU SAY? I had fainted many times in my life, but this was a different thing, for sure. According to her, I was flopping about on the floor like I was being electrocuted. Thankfully I hadn’t injured myself or even bit my tongue. A trip to the doctor was in order. He was a little dubious of my mother’s recounting of the event (she has a long history of medical exaggeration), so after a few cursory tests he sent me home and told me to let him know if anything else strange happened. Nothing did, at first.

Fast forward two years. I’ve moved in with my boyfriend, a man 10 years older than me, who is a different race, smokes (cigarettes and pot), with little ambition and a minimum-wage job. Yeah, my parents loved him. NOT. Which is of course why I had to move in with him. I went to see the same doc for my annual exam and immediately following the pap, it happened again. This time right on the doctor’s table. I woke up to find nurses holding down my arms and a wooden dowel in my mouth. I didn’t have to ask what happened. Perhaps out of guilt that they didn’t take my mother’s account seriously enough last time, he sent me to a specialist. They went all out with the neurological testing, but found nothing. Despite the lack of findings I was put on the epilepsy drug Dilantin, a barbiturate that’s been around since the 30’s, and told not to go near water alone. I showered in fear for years…but, I digress.

If Dr. Google had been around then I could have prevented all that followed by finding out for myself that “It interacts with a number of other antiepileptic drugs and other drugs, including oral contraceptives.” This singularly important fact was never mentioned to me by any of my doctors. So, you guessed it, about six months later I became pregnant.

That week in March is mostly a blur, it seemed both to be happening very slow and very fast at the same time. At work one day I went to the bathroom and felt just the faintest twinge of nausea. Call it what you will, but at that instant I knew that I was pregnant, despite the fact that this little twinge was the very first symptom I had had. In a panic I called my doctor and found out he was on vacation, but his brother (also a GP) was filling in for him. At the office they confirmed with both a HPT and a blood test. If they told me the HcG level, I don’t remember it and/or wouldn’t have understood what it meant anyway. Dr. Brother cheerfully examined me and said he thought I was about 15 weeks. You could have pushed me over with a feather. How was this possible? My periods were on schedule and normal and I didn’t seem to have gained any weight (this would have been obvious as I was barely 100 pounds at the time).

I left the office in tears and dropped the bombshell on my boyfriend (same guy). He told me it was my decision and he would back me up either way. Great, thanks. You must understand that not only was I young, unmarried and financially unprepared to have a baby, as a sexual abuse survivor I was conditioned to believe this was the absolute WORST thing that could have happened. During those years of abuse there was no greater threat to the secret than getting pregnant. Coupled with my mother’s constant warnings and horror stories from too early an age, even at age 20 all I could feel was sheer terror. I knew there was no possible way that I could keep the baby, but I put up the front I thought I should, pretending to struggle with the decision and gathering what information I could on all the horrible birth defects that the Dilantin undoubtedly had already caused. Once I told my doctor I wanted to terminate I had to go before a review board, since I was already into the second trimester. I don’t remember much of that, only the feeling of immense relief that they approved the D&C because of the drug interaction. If the hospital actually performed tests on the fetus, I have no knowledge of that, nor do I know the sex.

As luck would have it, my boyfriend was out of the town the weekend of the surgery, so I stayed with my parents. They were remarkably understanding and helpful, even my mother. I had no complications and healed quickly, physically at least. Do I regret my decision? No, it was the right decision at the time. Does it still affect me? You bet. More than I can express. Especially now, since I know that was my only shot at it.

But my story isn’t done yet. I was told that since I still had to be on the Dilantin (for how long?), I couldn’t take BCPs. In my mind, that left one alternative: sterilization. I was completely prepared to have my tubes tied right then and there. My boyfriend, clearly more afraid that he wouldn’t be having any more sex than he was with his own reproductive future, offered to have a vasectomy instead of me going through more surgery. And so that’s what happened.

After being on Dilantin for two years straight I was told to stop taking it, just out of the blue. Perhaps a year after the D&C I began to have severe abdominal pain and underwent a lap, which determined I had endometriosis. To treat this problem, yup, you guessed right again, I was put back on BCPs. In December of that year the boyfriend became the fiancé. When he asked me to marry him I just couldn’t say no (even though I knew I should), not after I was the reason he would never have children, not after the vasectomy was completely unnecessary. To this day I feel like I held the scalpel in my own little hand. I know he doesn’t blame me, and has never, ever, even in the fierce battles right before we split up for good, brought it up as being my fault or something he regretted. It’s my own guilt.

I stayed on BCPs for many, many years. Through the first marriage and divorce, and through the first tentative years with the love of my life, through the second wedding day. Then I began the campaign to stop taking them so we could have children. For the first time in my life I actually wanted to get pregnant. And you know the rest of the sad story. It wasn’t meant to be. And here I am, once again taking the little pills, this time to treat perimenopausal symptoms. Funny how something so small has had such a huge impact in my life. Not ha ha funny. If you got his far, thanks for reading.