So, It's now 3 and a bit months since I made that recording and it's so interesting to listen to it because my understanding of this is waay better now. [NEW RECORDING: You can hear from what I was saying that my mind was in the space of it being mainly about contraception, not about the bigger picture of female health. I knew that coming off it would be good for my health because of the bad things that it can do to your body, such as shrinking your hypothalamus, which I flagged up in the first recording. I've since learned that there's a hell of lot more bad things that hormonal contraception does to your health, but I'll cover all the gory details about that in another podcast! What I've also realised is that charting your body temp is a kinda secret health tool that not enough people are talking about. If you're a woman and you're into health tracking, and you're in your fertile years, you're missing out if you're not tracking your cycle, because if your menstrual cycle isn't healthy that means you're not healthy. So, given that I am someone who's into health tracking, or at least someone who's into being and feeling as healthy as I can, I've realised that FAM is really not just about when you can have sex to avoid pregnancy (or indeed to get pregnant)! In fact, you don't even need to be in your fertile years or to be female to get something out of tracking your basal body temperature. If your temperature is too low, this might be a sign that you have thyroid problems, for instance.
I myself have discovered that I'm not that healthy currently as my cycle is unbalanced and that my body temperature is too low. I won't cover the details of all of this in this podcast, though, as it's too much to get into now. I'll talk about it instead in depth another podcast, which I'll probably call something like "how do you know if your menstrual cycle is healthy? And how to fix it if it isn't". But for now,] let's cover...
How I felt before getting it out: once I'd decided I wanted it out, I REALLY wanted it out, to the point that I imagined digging it out myself if, for some reason, I couldn't have secured an appt or if the appt had fallen through.
Where I live in the west of England, I tried booking a slot with local GPs and sexual health clinics in the region and discovered I wouldn't be able to get an appt for months - completely oversubscribed service. Luckily I go to London on a semi-regular basis and was able to secure an spot at a sexual health clinic in Soho, one that's primarily used by gay men but they squeeze in a few of us uterus-havers now and again! They're open for really long hours and fit in a lot more people than our provincial services can, so I was so happy to get myself in there in the evening after work.
This very point - that it was hard to get an appointment - in itself is kinda frightening -- when that happened I suddenly realised at that I had given up my bodily autonomy by having the implant put into my flesh. Short of cutting into my own arm, which would've been a bit insane, I was reliant on having a medical professional do it for me. If it had been difficult for me to get to London or if I hadn't found an available appt, I would've been stuck with this artificial hormone, that I knew was damaging me, continuing to pump out into my body! That's would've been a really horrible situation to be in. Now, in retrospect knowing what I do now know, I'm surprised at how willing I was to get into that situation and that it didn't occur to me that this was incredibly weird!
But then thinking about it, people do this all the time in our modern days, to greater or lesser extents, and that's why we don't think these things are weird. Rather than fixing our own health problems, we put our lives in the hands of doctors to put us on all manner of medications. At least with medications you can stop taking them, of course, but that's not necessarily straightforward, as going cold turkey can cause you damage. So, in that sense, you become reliant on the medical system, as once people are on medications, they don't tend to come off them. On the contrary, they end up taking more and more.
Then there are things like pacemakers and knee/hip replacements, where a foreign element is introduced into the body. We don't think to dramatically change our lifestyles, like by going on a very low-carb diet/meat-based diet to prevent a pacemaker or other foreign object being put in the body in the first place. For example, orthopaedic surgeons Shawn Baker and Gary Fettke note is absolutely possible for things like knee and hip replacements -- they found that patients who went on a low carb or carnivore diet would then no longer need their services. I know that I only get back pain - sometimes debilitating back pain - when I eat the crap that I use to eat.
In any case, back to the subject in hand, the woman who extracted the implant for me was super nice and she wasn't dismissive of the fact that I was planning to use FAM. But she did warn me about it in a way that nobody ever bothered to do when it came to taking hormonal contraceptives. She said that women do get pregnant when using FAM and not to just rely on the app but to read up about it and look on a particular website (which might've been fertilityuk.org/) to learn about cervical mucus changes and other indicators, such as a change in the position of the cervix that happens before ovulation.
It's not like I thought she wasn't giving me good advice -- she was! I just wish that all the people who I saw, doctors and nurses alike, when I went on the pill or implant had given me similarly nuanced advice about hormonal contraceptives. Why is the only concern about whether we get pregnant or not? (Which, as we heard, was reflected in my own mentality before I learned about all of this.) Why don't they care about women's general health and the many, many risks that there are from going on HBC?
In the immediate weeks after removal, I and/or my partner noticed that:
- I was falling asleep faster than previously (the other half noticed that one, as I tend to fall asleep on him before he falls asleep)
- I was able to sleep longer than I could before. Before that, for a really long time (I can't remember exactly), I've trouble getting more than 6 hours of sleep a night. I thought I was feeing OK, but I was still frustrated by the fact that I couldn't sleep that well, and suspected that there was something not quite right with me. The fact that I can now sleep 7-8 hours a night just shows that there was something wrong with me - hormonal birth control!
- Now, for the next one, my apologies for potentially oversharing here, but it is scientifically relevant for the issue in question! My partner and I started having a higher proportion of simultaneous orgasms
- This was because I suddenly started finding it easier to orgasm, and even had to hold it off once or twice because I felt it was happening too quickly! I only recall that happening once or twice otherwise since my early 20s before I went on HBC.
- It seemed like I was feeling more -- like my senses or sensitivity were enhanced right after I got rid of the fake progesterone and getting the real hormones back
- Other than sleep and sex I didn't notice any major mood or physical changes immediately
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