I was just scrolling on Instagram. I, you know, follow all those people and it was just an Instagram reel and she did, ‘A day in my life dealing with PMDD,’ and she just went over all of that, like it’s… hard to do anything. It’s hard to move ’cause it hurts so bad. I am dealing with all of these thoughts and, I guess to try and bring awareness to it because, yeah, I thought what I was going through was normal.
When you just look up PMS, like, ‘Oh yeah, you’ll get cramps. You might feel a little down,’ but it just… was progressively getting so much worse that I was like, ‘Oh, this might be something that I am also experiencing.’ I would like to go through and try and get myself diagnosed or look more into it which I started doing a lot of cycle research after that. I didn’t know anything like luteal phase, menstrual, follicular—like, she was who started it all for me.
So my biggest thing was that I wasn’t taken very seriously. It took me two and a half years to be diagnosed from when I first was noticing that my PMS symptoms weren’t like other people’s. It was like extreme depression and I’d have at least one breakdown of, ‘Everyone hates me. I’m the worst person in the world. Nobody’s gonna show up to my funeral.’ That was one of ’em. That’s it. ‘I’m nobody. I’m fading away.’ And I could wake up the next morning and it was like it never happened. And of course, like, really bad cramping still and just so intense. And I thought it was normal. It was also very, in my opinion, very quick because I didn’t actually start menstruating till I was almost 17. And now I’m 25 and it’s like it got progressively worse.
So I went and saw an OB-GYN, and she was like, ‘No, you’re depressed. And if you just fix your depression, then your period will get better.’ And so I didn’t know if I quite agreed, so I went and saw just my primary care provider and had to do a depression screening, whatever. Same thing, labeled with, ‘Well, you’re just depressed, so you can either start seeing a therapist or go on antidepressants.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll start with therapy. We’ll see.’
And so it was like another year of just like talk therapy and sure, yes, I do think I had some underlying anxiety and depression, but nothing really made a difference. Like every half of my month, every month, I feel like a completely different person. I can’t do anything, relationships are being ruined because I can’t talk to anybody. I have a really mean undertone to my voice.
So then I finally, when I moved to a new city and got a new primary care provider, I was actually looking just going onto like an antidepressant because that’s what was recommended. And I had just brought it up. Like, I actually was crying. It was like a telehealth—it was during that time—and I just couldn’t hold it together. I couldn’t, I didn’t even have to say it. I just was like, oh… I think I’m dealing with depressive symptoms and anxiety and whatever else. And I read her notes afterwards and, you know, like it had generalized anxiety disorder and stuff written down, but she also had put PMDD without me even saying it. And it was so validating and I felt a lot better.
Had you said PMDD to the other two practitioners?
Yeah. And they still didn’t. Mm-hmm. They just didn’t. And they were both women, which is really unfortunate. Like, I don’t really like seeing men about my reproductive health and organs and… yeah, she was great and the antidepressants helped to an extent. But then I did recently go through with a hormonal IUD and that has been the most helpful so far because I just now don’t have to go through my cycle to experience it. And it’s been really helpful.
Can I ask you what, what your experience was getting your IUD inserted? Was it a positive experience?
It was neutral, I’d say. ‘Cause I kind of only heard really, really bad things, so I was preparing for the worst. But I would say with the intense pain I was feeling every two weeks, I can do it for, you know, the 30 seconds because it was about the same. It was the same level of pain and then just kinda like, ‘Okay, you’re done. Go home.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m glad I didn’t drive ’cause I was in a lot of pain,’ and I just sat for 15 minutes in the waiting room, took the bus home.
Did they recommend that you have a ride home?
Not really, no. I think I could have brought somebody with me or whatever, but I just went by myself. And I had a little stress ball that I squeezed. So I was crying before she literally like walked in the room and I started bawling and I was like—oh. She was like, ‘Are you okay to do this?’ And I was like, ‘Yes. I can. I can do it.’ There was no, like, if I hadn’t reached out to somebody that had gotten one recently… and so I reached out to her to, like, ask you a bunch of questions? And I felt more comfortable reaching out to just another person I knew rather than the doctor that was going to be doing the procedure. She wasn’t dismissive necessarily, but she also wasn’t really offering much other than just like, ‘We have this one, and if it’s too big and doesn’t fit, we’ll try this one.’ So yeah. Yeah.