So when I was about eight months pregnant my OB said that I should start looking into different forms of birth control for after I had Liam. So I started my research; I had no idea just how many forms of birth control there was! There is the pill, patch, ring, shot, implant rod, and IUD’s, as well as condoms, foam, sponge, spermicides…. And the list goes on and on I can only assume.
A couple months before Jon and I got married I went to my family doctor and we discussed the most popular forms of birth control and then I decided that I would start taking the pill. I took it religiously every night at 9 pm. I even had an alarm set lovingly named “Sperm Stopper” on my phone. Well, after we got married I slowly started getting a little down about myself and was super irritable and angry all the time. I would constantly get after Jon for little tiny things that really didn’t even matter. When we would go to bed at night, I would wait for him to fall asleep and then I would just cry because I had these horrible outbursts. I knew that I was being hormonal, but I couldn’t stop. It was awful! One night, Jon woke up during one of my emotional nights and was really concerned. After we had figured the only thing that had changed was my being put on birth control he told me to stop taking the pills. I stopped the next day and within the week felt much better. But we were in a dilemma, we now didn’t have birth control! Jon and I wanted to wait til he was done with school before having a baby so we knew that birth control really was a must. So back to my family doctor I went, and we discussed my options, I thought maybe getting the shot would work, but my doc said that if I had had a bad reaction to the birth control pill that the shot would probably be about the same if not worse, because the hormones were being put into my bloodstream and would affect me for months. Then he gave the suggestion to use the NuvaRing. It is a ring that is placed by the cervix for three weeks and then taken out for a period and then replaced again for three weeks. Very localized hormones and I could easily take it out. Doc gave me some samples for me to try it out, and it was amazing! I loved them! They were super awkward to get in and out but apart from that it was wonderful. I didn’t feel like crap and I wasn’t crazy! I used those for about four months, and it was awesome! The one problem that I had with the Ring was that just for one months prescription (ONE ring), the cheapest I found for an uninsured patient was about 80-100 dollars! So we were trying to figure out how to put that into the budget when Jon and I went camping to Lake Powell with his family. We were going over the week that should have been my period week and so since I wanted to be able to have fun in the water and what not I called Doc and asked if I could keep it in for another week to hold off my period and then just put a new one in. Doc said that that would be ok. So that’s what I did. That was in September. Jon and I got home and I took out my ring and waited for my period to start…. I waited one week, it didn’t come. I waited two weeks, it didn’t come. I waited three weeks, it didn’t come but I was having some really bad cramps. I thought that since I had held off my period for that week, the next period was going to be a doozy! The fourth week, I had about a day of bleeding, but only when I wiped. I didn’t need a pad or a tampon at all. Which I thought was odd because my cramping had been so incredibly bad, I was sure that my period was going to be at least a full seven days of heaviness. I was bloated, like period week and I was still having some cramping, but not nearly as bad as the week before, which had left me in the fetal position popping Pamprin after Pamprin just to get through the day. Then on October 30th, Jon said that we should take a pregnancy test just to make sure I wasn’t pregnant. My mother had been making little comments here and there about how I was pregnant but she always seemed to be joking, and I would laugh at her and tell her that I wasn’t pregnant. Then on October 30th Jon said that we should pick up a pregnancy test just to be sure and so I laughed at him and said ok. Well, we got home and I took the pregnancy test, fully expecting it to be negative. When I looked at it and it had a cute little positive sign on it, I was extremely shocked.
So those are my experiences with birth control so far. One made me crazy, and the other I got pregnant on. Although, granted, it was most likely human error on our part for the Nuva Ring mess up. So in my research of birth controls I read everything I could when OB said to look. Most of the people on the topics of Mirena had a wonderful experience and were totally in love with how easy it is. There were very few that hated it, on the forums.
At my six week check up I told OB that I wanted to get the Mirena placed and we set up an appointment to get it placed. Placement was a lot easier than I expected it to be. I had heard horror stories about that! For me, it was a little cramping, but overall pretty fast and relatively painless. My OB is really awesome and was fantastic at keeping me calm and relaxed (he seriously is the best OB and I want him to deliver all my babies!). After it was in, I was a little lightheaded but not bad enough to cause a problem. I went home and everything was fine.
I started my school schedule up again, and I planned my classes around Liam’s feeding schedule. Liam is an awesome first child! I don’t know how I got so lucky! He slept through the night since coming home and would wake up at about six am to eat, then fall asleep again until about nine or ten in the morning, wake up, eat. Fall asleep until about two, wake up and eat. He was really good on a three to four hour schedule. I loved breastfeeding him! It is probably one of the best feelings in the world, and it made me feel so connected to him and it made me feel so good about myself, because I had the greatest purpose in the world! Feeding my child. When you think of it, it really is amazing how perfect our bodies are, to know what to do with our children! Occasionally it would hurt and I was silly and didn’t work past the hurt, my let down was also painful once he started feeding, but after it was fine. Like I said earlier, I started up my school schedule again when he was about three months, and I planned it around him eating. So I would go to school at about nine and come home at two. I would feed him when we woke up at six, then again at eight when my mother would come and watch him and then as soon as I got to my mum’s house to pick him up, I would feed him again. Then about two weeks after we set up this schedule Liam started going through a growth spurt and was wanting to eat every hour to two hours. I tried to pump when I got home from school so that I could send milk to my mothers house, but my milk couldn’t keep up with how much he wanted to eat because I wasn’t the one feeding him every time he wanted to eat. His hunger went up while my supply went down. Finally, he wasn’t satisfied when I would feed him and I couldn’t keep up with the pumping, so after discussing it with my mom, we decided that we would switch to formula. I thought that I would be ok with it, and for the first little bit I was. But then every time he was hungry and I needed to make him a bottle started making me feel really bad, and I felt so bad trying to make him his bottle. And I would constantly apologize to him and tell him how sorry I was that I couldn’t feed him right away and that he had to wait. Soon, my feelings of depression deepened and I could tell that I was starting to go farther and farther into my sorrow. I felt completely hopeless, I felt like I was a horrible mother because I couldn’t breastfeed my baby anymore. I felt like I was a horrible wife because I started to gain weight because I stopped caring about myself or my body, and I didn’t care what I ate and food became an emotional crutch and I would eat when I was hungry, sad, or bored; which was all the time. I felt like I was a bad daughter because all of my failed attempts at school and knowing how important it is to my dad that I had an education. I was losing interest in my schoolwork, and I wasn’t able to stay focused in class. Toward the end of my semester, it became more and more difficult to get up out of bed and go to my morning classes, so soon I was only going to one class. I was going to bed at a low point every night and waking up at a low point every morning. I would wake up and was sad that I had awakened. I had lost my will to live, I had lost my purpose. It was so bad! I would constantly push Jon away because I didn’t feel attractive and I didn’t feel good enough for him, and it was putting a real strain on our young marriage. I was also starting to have cramping all the time. At first it was inconsistent, but soon it was becoming a pain that I was dealing with every day for hours on end.
Jon and I eventually had a fight that made us both realize that something was wrong. I knew that I had been depressed for months, but I didn’t know how to fix it, and I felt ashamed that I was feeling like I was because I thought of all the single mothers that don’t have help and don’t have support who are wonderful mothers and do so well at being moms. And I felt like I didn’t have an excuse to be depressed because I had a wonderful mother and a wonderful husband and the best friends that I could hope for, and a wonderful ward full of people that I knew cared about me. But amongst all of these people I felt like I was alone in the universe. I finally broke down and knew that if I was going to get out of this that I needed help greater than my own conviction. So I went to Doc, and we had a long talk about everything that had been going on and how I was feeling and he prescribed me Zoloft. I started taking my anti-depressants and it made a huge difference! Finally I started to not wake up depressed and angry, I was finding it easier to not get mad at Jon for every little annoying thing that he did. I would feel those feelings of doubt and worry creep up on me and I just stopped caring about all the little negative things in my life and tried to focus on the good. I felt better than I had in a long time. This was also the time that I got my gym membership because I wanted to lose my baby/post baby weight and start being healthy again.
My weight was being super stubborn and wouldn’t come off, even though I was trying my hardest to get it off. Finally I stopped going to the gym because it wasn’t working. My cramping had also gotten to an all time high. I was in labour for 38 hours with Liam and I did 27 hours unmedicated, and those contractions were bad, but the cramping that I was experiencing was so much worse than my contractions. It was every day, constantly. It was very tiring and wore me out just to do small things while cramping. I realized that my cramping had started AFTER I had gotten my Mirena. So I started doing some researching again, only this time looked at the bad side effects of Mirena. And I realized that most of what had been happening with me from September to about February from the depression to the cramping to the heavy periods had all started AFTER I got Mirena. So I called OB’s office and talked to a sweet nurse there and I made an appointment to get my Mirena taken out the following Monday.
February 18, 2013 I went in to see OB and he took maybe ten minutes to get the Mirena out. I had light cramping for the rest of the day, and I had some bleeding that lasted about three days but only when I wiped, but the feeling was amazing! For the first time in five months I wasn’t cramping for hours every day. I felt so much better! Suddenly I realized that I was becoming more and more apathetic about everything, so I decided to try stopping my anti-depressants and within that week I felt like I had purpose again, everything in my life seemed lighter and brighter!
Overall, Mirena is a wonderful concept, and it works well for some people but I just can’t handle hormones in my body for extended periods of time. It just doesn’t work for me. But I am feeling good about life again, I’m not cramping, even with my first post-Mirena period, no cramping and one day of heavy bleeding. It has been a huge turnaround in just a month and a half! I still feel some feelings of sadness when I think about Liam not breastfeeding anymore but the feelings are not nearly as bad as when they were during my Mirena induced depression. I am almost positive that if I had not had the Mirena placed my depression would have not been as long or as bad as it was. I am so sure that it would have been a simple case of baby blues and then I would have been fine.
Today, I went to the gym for about forty five minutes and I did three minutes on the elliptical to warm up and then I did three sets of fifteen on the leg lifts(weighted at thirty pounds) and squats (not weighted with anything! I’m not that strong yet!) as well as doing my fifteen arm raises forward and side with four pound weights in between each set of leg workouts. Then for fun (ha) I added fifteen crunches with 70 pounds at the end, and then finished out with a three minute cool down on the stationary bike. I have also had some cream of wheat today and a dry salad (so…. Lettuce) and I’ve had two bottles of water so far. I need to drink more water to be done for the day.
