Some Uber Personal Info

TRIGGER WARNING: This post dives into excessive detail about menstruation. If this topic is distressing to you please avoid reading further.

I am 51. What? No! No!!! No way!! No way Jose! You look AMAZING!

Oh, stop it! Seriously…stop it. STOP! It’s just soap and and water. And my childlike wonder at the marvel of the universe.

So thank you. But yes I am old(er)…But…(trigger warning)…I am still getting my period. I’m long over debating whether or not I want to have children. However, my body did not get the message. My uterus keeps saying things like, “We can still do this! We can make it happen. All we need is a fast Hail Mary swimmer.”

No, Uterus, no we can’t. I don’t have the resources, energy or, most important, desire to have children. Plus I sometimes think women who have children late in life just ran out of things to do. I still have things to do.

Still, I have lived with a uterus for almost all of my life. And, as it turns out, having a uterus is a very complicated and horrible thing. Women’s bodies are grossly under-researched by the medical field mostly because in the history of life women’s bodies are viewed as “Not Male.” I read half of Dr. Jen Gunther’s “The Menopause Manifesto” by Jen Gunther but I had to put it down. Not because I don’t think it’s a great book but so many chapters ended with …”there is not enough research” about INSERT A PART OF REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS. I mean even calling it “reproductive organs” makes us sound like baby making machines.

Aside from “the talk” about monthly periods and tampons, uterus-bearing women are grossly underprepared for being uterus-bearing women.

For many of the roughly 480 menstrual cycles that my body went through I have suffered from pain, fatigue and the emotional hormonal roller coaster of Magic Mountain’s “Apocalypse: The Ride.” When the real apocalypse happens I will be so prepared emotionally.

At every state of my life I found myself in a doctor’s office with a male doctor offering me birth control pills as a remedy. I never really wanted to take them, but doctors pushed them on me like drug dealers. Just do it, they said. It’s no big deal. EVERYONE DOES IT! But won’t these fuck with my hormones? What could you possibly know about your own body? was the response.

Something about birth control pills does not seem right. I mean don’t they reverse everything that our uterus is intended to do. Like reverse the will of God? Now I am adamantly pro-choice and pro-abortion but you can’t act like restructuring your hormones is not going to do something to your body. Years later we are finally having discussions about the side effects of birth control pills.

In October I had my period for 26 days. 26 DAYS OF BLOOD. Many people don’t know this but as some women age their period gets heavier and more flood-like. Much like the scene from “The Shining” where a wave of blood comes out of the elevator and into the hallway of the creepy hotel. And, to be honest, Stanley Kubrick had no business making that scene. That was not his story to tell. Much like Steven Spielberg should not have directed “The Color Purple.” Stay in your lane, please. Deranged psychopath serial killers…that is a White Male Director’s material. Large quantities of blood? That is a Perimenopausal Woman’s story!

So after the 26 days of blood rain, I went to the doctor and they had me take a uterine cancer test. Sure, it’s probably cancer! Thank the heavens the test came back negative. So…what is it? Why is this happening? We don’t know, they said. You don’t know? The mysteries of a woman’s body are beyond medical research. How can doctors not know what a heavy period is about? Isn’t that something that half of women go through…and by most women I mean 5 billion people. Oh, wait, what we meant was we don’t care…”we don’t care!” You have a condition called “Note Male”-itis.

So much like the answer to period pain was birth control pills the answer to my heavy flow is Perimenopause. According to the Internet it can begin sometime in a woman’s late 30s and go into her 50s. Yes, several decades. By that estimation. I have been in perimenopause for about 11 years.

So why am I writing about my period. For years, I internalized misogyny and society and kept my mouth shut about this monthly trauma known.

Because for the past 40 some years I have sat through movies, shows and, mostly, heard jokes about penises, male masturbation and male views on sex for 40 years! Female comics have been shamed into the silent belief that period blood is less gross than male semen. Think about it. Blood flows. Semen sticks.

It’s almost over for me, but I am sad I never got the support I needed. I am writing this blog and talking about it in standup so that young women may experience a different world. I want young women to know which exact hormones are causing her to feel angry, sad, bloated, or on fire. To pay as much attention to her body much as Elon Musk pays to his giant penis/rocket ship. As much as attention as we pay to our phones.