ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

It’s funny that I never really began to notice this until I started Weight Watchers and embarked on a general campaign of taking better care of myself in late 2006, but I have a very predictable biological pattern that continues to confound me each month. You should note that this is going to be one of those posts in which I overshare. In the biological sense. Yes. I am talking about female troubles.

I suspect that the reason I never figured this out before is that when I was fat, I think I was doing my best to just ignore everything about my body. I ate whether I was hungry or not. I tried not to care about how I was beginning to pop out of my size 18 pants. Until I cleaned up my act and realized I could feel better, there was no reason for me to understand that my “normal” was actually a lot like other people’s “lousy”. So I figure this is part of why I never thought much about this before.

But over the past year and a half or so, I’ve noticed that I do have a predictable pattern, which I hate. I’ve been on the low hormone Orthotricyclen-Lo pill this entire time. But other than the predictability this causes in my actual cycle, which corresponds with the week’s worth of dummy pills included in the little blister pack, I’ve observed other tendencies. Other than the normal bloating and cramping and typical symptoms, I’ve picked out two others that tend to disrupt my life pretty badly for a few days.

Starting Sunday of the dummy pill week, I experience a three or four day span during which I lose almost all control over my eating. I don’t even know how to explain it. I am hungry constantly during these few days, and even after I physically realize I have eaten enough, I am driven to keep eating. Nothing seems to help me regain my former composure, and no matter how many times I go through this, each time always feels like it will last forever. I always spend this three days feeling disgusted with myself, terrified that I’ve reverted to my old eating habits and won’t be able to get back in control.

I realize that despite my earlier comments, I must have been aware of this before, because I remember now that my old roommate and I had a name for it: Hungry Tom. Tom is an acronym for Time Of the Month.

Hungry Tom doesn’t help me with my other problem, which is that I think I am experiencing a mild form of depression at about the same time. Sometimes it begins a little before Hungry Tom, and it basically just involves feeling unhappy for no readily discernible reason. If there was something that was bothering me a little before, it suddenly feels like a huge problem. I don’t get all that irritable or angry, but I do feel incredibly sad.

The thing I hate so much about both of these is that from an intellectual perspective, I realize they are biological in nature and my own personal history tells me that they will pass in a few days. But at the time, they feel so genuine that it’s hard for me to believe that they are hormonal counterfeits. Since I know consciously that these emotions are a symptom with physiological origins, it seems like this awareness should give me dominion over them. Mind over matter, right? It never works out like this, though, and it always makes me feel worse to realize that simply knowing it isn’t “real” doesn’t change anything.

So a few months ago when I began seeing commercials for a new oral contraceptive named “Yaz”, I was interested. Yaz markets itself as the ideal birth control product, geared toward diminishing menstrual symptoms. The cheerful models on the screen made it clear that in addition to reducing bloating and constipation, Yaz can also help to control some of the emotional symptoms many women experience. Then I went for my well-woman exam, which is a routine pelvic examination used to verify that your lady bits are not filled with cancer, and asked the gynecologist about this product.

I walked away with a prescription and two months worth of free samples, which is one of the things I love most about my gynecologist’s office - they hand out free birth control like it is candy. This whole writing was more or less prompted by the fact that I’ve had a rather bad dummy pill week this week, and am looking forward to seeing what “Yaz” is like. Judging by the literature inside the box, it may be good for me. Also, I looked into it, and could not determine any logical reason why the product has such a dumb name, unless they are trying to appeal to a youth demographic by sounding jaunty. I think the name sounds silly to begin with, but it reminds me specifically of a girl named Michelle who was two grades ahead of me in high school, who changed her name to Jasmine (pronounced yaz-MEEN) as soon as she turned 18, and spent the rest of high school futilely correcting everyone who called her Michelle or JAZ-min. And so I think of this girl with wry amusement every time I think of my new prescription contraceptive.

That said, I noticed that “Yaz” has only four dummy pills. I cannot help but hold great hopes that this means wonderful, wonderful things for my future.