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It’s been a while since we’ve had a chat about vaginas here on Smaggle. I got such a fabulous response the last time I wrote about lady bits in my Regular VS Applicator Tampons article (which got linked to on Mamamia last week!!!) that I thought I’d bite the bullet and open up the old contraception topic for discussion.
In the time I have been boinking (I can’t say sexually active, I sound like Mama Smaggle) I have only been on the pill for one year. It was pretty awful and I ended up with irregular periods, absent periods, periods that would last for an entire cycle and on top of all this mayhem it made my hair go straight. Every doctor I’ve had says this is scientifically impossible but I swear it happened. My hair was curly, I went on the pill, it went straight, I went off the pill and it went curly again but truthfully it’s never really been the same. Coincidence? Unlikely.
As I am nothing without my hair I promptly switched to condoms to save my precious locks and to have a break from what seemed like a never ending period of periods and have been using them for about four years. They are cheap, efficient, readily available and unlike hormonal contraception I can see when it’s failed and can take proper precautions like the morning after pill. However I think condoms are a little impersonal if you’re in a long term committed relationship and my excruciating period pain has been getting worse recently so I’ve been looking for an alternative contraception that might help with that. I’m also one of the unlucky few women in the world who gets ovulation pain. If you don’t know what that is, then you’ve never had it. It’s like a second bout of period pain exactly 14 days after your period ends. You can literally ‘feel’ your egg travelling down the felopian tube. And by ‘feel’ I mean eight hours of sharp stabby pains in your lower right abdomen as your egg is beating the living crap out of the inside of your uterus. It’s delightful.
To cut a long story short I was seeing a specialist gynecologist the other day, or rather paying him $450 to tell me, very seriously, that I have a 5% chance of developing cervical cancer over the next ten years. I have a higher chance of getting hit by a bus so I found this information unnecessarily ominous. I decided to make the appointment worth the money so I told him about my ninja ovaries and their death plan for my sanity and he suggested that I try NuvaRing.
I had never heard of it but thought I would give it a try. It’s basically a rubber ring that doesn’t look unlike a silicone hair band and you kind of squish it in half and insert it like a tampon. It has low dose, slow release hormones that act just like the pill but it’s localised so it doesn’t travel through your whole system. You leave the ring in for three weeks, take it out, have a period and put another one in after your period. I’ve only been using it for a month but I really like it. I don’t have that medicated feeling like I have on the pill and I didn’t get any ovulation or period pain this month. My hair appears to be doing fine so far but I’ll be closely monitoring the situation in the months to come.
Everyone that I’ve spoken to in Australia about NuvaRing has either never heard of it or is completely mistrusting of it. At around $30 per month it’s kind of expensive but that’s really subjective depending on how much you’ve previously spent on contraception. Apparently it’s quite big in the UK but according to my doctor, Australian women collectively are quite conservative when it comes to innovative contraception and prefer to stick to tried and true methods.
My question to you is… what contraception do you use? And why? Have you had bad experiences with contraception? Great experiences? Oh and please let me know your age and location, it’s always so interesting to see what my international readers have to say.
Also if anyone has used or is using NuvaRing I’d love to hear about your experiences!
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