I can't remember/don't know when my mother started, but I started mine in the fifth grade. That day, at school, we had our first "sex ed" class where menstruation was explained... gave us each a little pad in a paper baggy to take home. A few hours after I got home, I went to the bathroom, and even after having that class I LOST MY FREAKING MIND. Was screaming for my mom. She was all giddy and excited about it, waving that pad I'd gotten at school around and probably dancing.
Menstruation is unbearably horrific for me in many, many ways.
Above all else? Wrap your head around how terrible this is -- I'm a severe hematophobe.
I either vomit or faint at the sight of blood (typically, I vomit when it is someone else's or movie/photo gore, and faint if it is my own).
Yeah. Entirely serious.
I also have ridiculously terrible cramps. None of my doctors have ever been able to explain it or offer a solution to help besides birth control.
Every single month since I started it that day in the fifth grade, my cramps have been crippling. I had to skip school for the first few days (the "second day" is always the worst, I could never leave bed) of it every time, and if I tried to go to school anyway, for a test or similar, I was always sent home. Once, the nurse called my father and said if he wasn't at the school to get me in fifteen minutes, she was calling an ambulance.
Nothing helps. No amount of midol or aleve or any medicine possible alleviates it.
I do not think that I have ever gotten "bitchy" from PMS, but I do cry. I cry a lot, over everything, and over nothing. I become completely irrational (to the point of suicidal every so often), but only while on my period. I'm not sure if its the hormones, or just my genuine misery at the pain and having to handle bleeding when I can't even look at it, or what -- but someone else was mentioning being emotionally destroyed during it, and I understand that completely.
Even before I was aware of what being transgendered meant or knew of the term or anything of the sort, I've wanted to have those parts removed, just so that perhaps I could live a slightly more normal life.
All I do, for now, is manipulate my birth control to skip it... I don't take the week of placebo pills and just start the next pack, and it doesn't come.
