No, it’s not normal.
Your wife (and you) should not have to suffer. Please explore alternatives. The two of you deserve happiness.
I won’t tell you what you should do, but I’ll relate my experience with BC. For some years I also took the 3-weeks-on-one-week-off type of pills. No problems for the first few years and then I started having strange behavior changes. It took me a long time to associate the issues I was having with my pill cycle.
I would get headaches behind my left eye on a Monday and they would last for a few days. That was the first pattern I noticed. Then I was starting to have irrational, sudden bursts of rage over really trivial things. VERY unlike me. My normal personality is very even-keeled, calm and rational. For example, once while at my boyfriend’s house, as I was leaving his little dachshund walked in front of me almost tripping me. I felt bad for accidentally kicking him, but also simultaneously went into a blind rage and threw my keys on the floor. They all stared at me. The rational me was still in there somewhere because it only took a few of these rages for me to realize that I was not myself.
When I put the Monday headaches together with the fact that I started my pill cycles on Monday, I took my complaint to the doctor. I was told that BC pills don’t cause headaches on Mondays and I was likely just imagining things. Gave me a prescription for Imitrex (migraine medication). I tried it and it did nothing for me. So setting the obstinate doctor aside, I took it upon myself to stop taking my BC pills (and of course didn’t have sex) and arranged to have my tubes tied. (I had no interest in children and knew I never would.) The headaches and irrational rages disappeared and I quickly came back to my normal personality.
So, don’t let the doctor’s tell you that your wife’s problems with BC are her imagination. I think they’re guessing about things just as much as we are. I also used to have a friend who had a stroke at age 22. She was sure it was caused by her BC pills (which she immediately stopped taking after the stroke), but she wasn’t able to get any doctors to make that diagnosis. Likely because they didn’t want to be sued or cause their fellow doctors to be sued. Stroke is one of the “rare” side effects of the pill, but the medical industry seems to focus really hard on that word “rare”.
One of the tough things about this is that she has to advocate for herself in this situation. Let me explain.
A person that is bipolar may go off their meds when they are manic. They feel good and can’t remember the lows so they don’t see a problem. My wife isn’t bipolar (though some in her family and my family are) but there is a similarity. When she’s experiencing the first week of the pill and feels like she does that’s all she can see. She just took my word for years that she was being different. Only recently has she been able to see it. When she feels like her usual self after this first week or so she can’t remember what week one was like. So she can’t advocate for herself because it’s like it never happened to her.
I, on the other hand, can tell you all of the themes of this week that will come up. I can have this week anytime because I’ve watched it. I know that usually around Thursday she will feel like she has no friends and nobody likes her. I can literally pinpoint days in some sort of bad Groundhog Day movie scenario.
My wife is reading all of this. Having it written out and seeing responses is helping. I can’t imagine how hard it is to effectively be someone else for so long and to then switch back like it was nothing over and over again and to have to rely on someone else to tell you who you are being right now. It’s not fun for her. It’s a heavy responsibility on me as well.
I think we’ve been dealing with so much from our lives in and getting out of a cult and just trying to catch up in life in general that this issue has been run over with the others. This issue at least disappeared for a while. But now we’re free from much of our pasts and now it’s time to deal with things like this. The good news is that we’ve overcome so much and we’ll overcome this too.
Thanks JcWoman for putting forth your experience. It helps. I’m glad you found your way through it.
It’s normal in that pills can fuck up a woman physically and mentally in a weird way. And those side-effects are different for every different woman. You’re not weird if you’re on a pill that makes your life difficult, which seems to be your situation.
But staying on a pill that makes your life difficult is not normal or necessary. There are plenty of alternatives. Just start with demanding a change in the pill she’s on. If changing doesn’t work then look in to other options.
Oh, I’m not taking it there.
But I will not allow blatant untruths about the risks of vasectomy vs. BCPs to go unanswered.
No, not normal at all. I’ve never heard of side-effects like that. I was on the pill for years as were all of my sisters and our mom. None of us ever had an issue with them.
Good luck, I sure hope she can get some relief. Neither of you should have to live like that.
Don’t know why this next fact isn’t espoused more often; doctors will literally recommend it if they’re up to date. You know you don’t have to do the “off” week, right? Just skip the off week and keep taking the pills. Skip getting the period. And that’s not even a proper period - it’s a withdrawal symptom, which tells a lot about why it has such a massive effect on some people’s moods. If you’re not letting your hormones go up and down, up and down, as you go three weeks on, one week off, your emotions may well stop going up and down, up and down too. It’s not a guarantee, of course. And some women will have breakthrough bleeding or never quite adapt to the permanent cycle. I personally go three months without a break and then let myself bleed for a week. My body seems to require it. It’s also a good way for me to just-in-case check that I’m not pregnant despite the birth control. And less blood everywhere is a plus in my book. So why take the placebo week? Don’t take the placebo pills and go straight to taking your next pill pack.
And yeah, the standard response from a doctor IS going to be to try another pill. There’s a hundred different formulations and if one is clearly giving you issues but you still need birth control, you switch. It’s nuts to stick with something giving you grief. You just keep switching until you find one that works or you give up and try another type of birth control entirely. Don’t know why that’s weird to you. Yeah, doctors don’t put any personalized effort in whatsoever and I hate them for it, but yeah, the solution really IS, “try another pill”. The doctor won’t be giving you any help in trying to figure out which one is good based on your previous attempts though, they just go down a list. Woo. Best get crackin’. Of course, maybe the placebos is your true problem, so if you’re tired of taking new medicines all the time (who isn’t) do the placebo week skip first.
What’s kinda odd to me is that the OP’s wife has pretty much the opposite experience from mine calendar-wise and goes against the usual PMS timing … although the mental symptoms sound pretty spot fucking on.
The “no pill” week is when you get your period, so for me, the first couple of days of that week - and the ending of the week before, which is the 3rd and final week of pills - those are my cranky, PMS-y days. Sometimes the irritability can set off a downward spiral of feeling worthless, too, like the OP describes. (Gawd I am such a bitch! No wonder everyone hates me, etc.)
The 1st pill of a fresh pack makes me feel … not exhilarated per se, but like I’m “me” again. (Which can be pretty fucking exhilarating.) I’ve often compared PMS to a computer virus; it hijacks your own brain. You know the Snickers commercials about how you’re not you when you’re hungry? It’s like that, times ten. (Or maybe times a hundred for Mrs. OP.)
To be clear, Mr. OP, I’m not at all saying that what she thinks and feels during The Bad Times is unusual, although it is more intense than what some of us endure. Just that the timing is precisely opposite from what I’d expect.
The fact that her symptoms worsen in autumn and winter points to SAD (seasonal affective disorder a.k.a. the wintertime blues) which can deepen the symptoms of her monthly cycle. My god, the Bad Time in January must be absolute hell inside her brain.
Anyway, I guess it’s fairly obvious to us that this particular b.c. method is not right for her. Whether a different pill will be better, or whether any hormone based method will cause the same problem, can unfortunately only be determined by the old Guess And Check method.
My wife had a similar reaction to hormonal birth control. I don’t remember which one, or whether she tried others, because she stopped using it anyway due to increased risk of breast cancer (on top of other factors that put her at high risk). We use condoms.
It is what I experienced, however. I was actually taking birth control because I used to get really bad periods and one was due right in the middle of my final exams, so I wanted to either skip it or at least reschedule it. The plan was to take it continuously, at least until the end of the exams.
The anger at everything started up within a day of starting the pills, and built up until I worked out why I hated everything and everyone, and stopped taking it. I was maybe on it for a bit over a month.
I can get grumpy when I’m PMSing, I think mostly because I find it hard to sleep due to cramps, but it’s nothing like the reaction I had to taking that stuff (iirc it was the progesterone only minipill, but it’s been a while).
This to infinity. ASAP.
I agree that the misinformation like this shouldn’t go unrefuted. I found a study from 2018 that might be from where you got your information, but here it is, anyway:
/derail
OP, the first step is to stop the birth control. If she has a bi-polar thing happening you will at least KNOW it’s not the pill. Until you figure out what’s is happening you abstain from sexual relations. If she had a broken hip you would abstain. So think of this time is, hopefully temporary. Get you and her to a GOOD doctor, asap.
@beckdawrek - I did not say that she was bipolar. She is not. She has reached out to her doc today and is awaiting a call back. I’m pretty sure I can grasp the concept of abstinence and don’t need the broken hip comparison. I’m not a monster, quite opposite in fact. I’m pretty sure she’ll be safe from my ravaging.
Glad to hear that this isn’t normal. I can’t address every reply but I appreciate them. My wife has known about the potential of simply taking pills and avoiding the off week but we both always felt like bleeding may be more normal than not and chose that route to try to be as natural as possible about it.
She’s doing research again after this and looking into things. Her doctor is at a place called Women First but where it’s always seemed more about rushing this person out so the next comes in and it runs like a machine.
As to why this hasn’t been addressed sooner, see my comments above regarding other things we’ve been addressing. Also my wife has had to learn basic skills like advocating for oneself, things many take for granted, and I’m glad to see her doing those things. She’s becoming more and more her own person and taking control of her own life. Her background is to simply deal with what is and never to challenge, seeking comfort with what is rather than reaching for something better. She is growing past much of that. It has not been an easy life for either of us.
My daughters and I all react badly to tricyclic pills. Moodiness, depression, irritability. I also found that it’s hard to notice from the inside. The emotions feel just as ‘real’ or valid as any other emotions. For me, just changing the pill I was on fixed it. My daughters went with other options. There are lots out there.
If you’re done having kids, then you should just go get snipped. The risks associated with vasectomy is extremely low, and you already see what’s happening to your wife using hormonal birth control pills. It shouldn’t even be a question of what you need to do here.
snipped 8 years ago, with no ill side effects
Uh, no. The worst part about getting a vasectomy is having your asshole fingered by a stranger, without so much as a shot of whiskey or flattery to loosen you up. Besides, if I have to choose between prostate cancer and 18 years of raising a child, I’ll seriously consider choosing cancer.
Naturalistic fallacy alert! There’s nothing “natural” about a BCP-regulated endocrine system. Just because the breakthrough bleeding mimics menstruation, doesn’t mean it has anything like the same physiological effects. It bothers me that more doctors don’t mention this. Not menstruating saves money too!
I agree with the chorus, there’s lots of options when it comes to oral contraception. I liked the “mini pill” which is progestin-only.
You said your wife doesn’t see the issues she is having or doesn’t remember how bad they are… maybe she could try journaling about her day? I would think, that maybe not reading back for a couple of months so a trend can be established? I know that with my cycle, the day before the bleeding started, I would be very emotional e.g. I would start crying over something and then think why is this bothering me so much? I eventually went on the injections which stopped the periods all together. Stopped the mood swings as well or at least I didn’t notice them. I hit menopause at 50 and was really happy to not have to deal with it any more.