The Obligatory Periodic Menstrual Entry
Get it? “Periodic”? Get it? Huh?
This is my monthly routine ever since I got off the Pill in May:
Morning of Day 1:
Everything is normal, except for the fact that I keep dropping things and Houston drivers are stupider than usual.
Evening of Day 1:
Suddenly, I realize that I’m a big loser. This is because I’ve figured out that whoever I’m currently dating secretly hates me, all my friends would rather watch reality TV than talk to me on the phone, my writing sucks, and I’ll never leave the insurance business. I spend the evening crying myself to sleep.
Day 2:
I bleed. Woo hoo! I’m bleeding! All that crap from yesterday was only PMS! I eat some sugar-free chocolate to celebrate (and because it keeps me from killing everyone on the freeway).
Day 3:
I’m not bleeding anymore. Okay, well… doo dee doo. Go on with life.
Morning of Day 4:
Still not bleeding. Feeling nervous. Am I… could I be… Could I be pregnant? Maybe Day 2 was just the spotting of early pregancy. Oh, crap… Dude, now that I’m thinking about it, I feel a little sick. WHY am I NOT bleeding?
Evening of Day 5:
I realize that the PMS-inspired worries of the other day were just the fantasies of a naive child. Now I know the truth – that my petty social concerns aren’t important at all in the face of the fact that I am a total freaking loser who will never make anything of herself and who’s destined to be miserable forever. Will I ever make enough money to buy a house? No. Will I ever make a living writing, so that I can quit working in hell/insurance? Obviously not. Will I be able to put my children through college? Hell, no, because college is only for the children of people who aren’t losers who don’t know how to make money. Why am I such a failure? Where did I go wrong? Why does all my hard work lead to nothing? How the hell am I ever going to get ahead? Why wasn’t I born a pop star, or a white man?
I don’t cry myself to sleep, exactly, but cold liquid does run out of my eyes in the dark as I conjure up money-making schemes in my dreams.
Day 6:
I bleed like a stuck pig, to use an evocative Southernism. Buckets of blood well up in my gut and lower back, making it hard to walk through the parking garage to my insurance day job. In my veal-pen, I listen to my coworkers chatter like excited gibbons in an echo chamber. I’m unable to refrain from putting my head on my desk and leaving it there, even if my boss and other “important” people are walking by.
I imbibe Ibuprofen, fake chocolate, and sugar-free hot chocolate mixed with coffee.
At 10:30 AM (or earlier, as it’s been lately), I tell my boss that I have to go home. Very slowly, I stagger back through the parking garage. All the way home, I thing of all the tasks and errands I’ll complete during my sick time. At home, I take off my work clothes and work jewelry, get into bed, and sleep until someone calls and offers to bring me a cheeseburger.
I eat the cheeseburger while watching bad TV and soaking up the sympathy of the cheeseburger-bearer. This until it’s time to go pick up my kids. Also, the whole time, I’m bleeding like a geyser.
Day 7:
Lately, more and more, I stay home from work on Day 7, too. And sleep. And bleed. And eat drugs.
Days 8, 9, 10:
I manage to get back to work. And, I bleed. A lot.
Days 11 through 30:
My body is busy making enough blood for the next time.
So, yeah. I’m thinking that I need to go back to the gynecologist and complain louder and more succinctly than I did last time. And I’m sure she’ll put me back on the Pill again. And that’s $30 a month that I don’t really have, owing to the fact that the insurance company where I work has rocket-high health insurance copays, seeing as how the median age there is, like, 62, and everyone’s always getting quadruple bypasses and hip replacements and titanium veins and shit.
But the good thing is that I’ve finally realized that the depress-o-matic feelings come right on schedule, once a month. So I can take them with grains of salt and go on with my life.
