To wonder why menstruation is the way it is

[Arina22]

I work in a female boarding school with teenagers.

Every week one of them is in terrible pain from her period. It ruins a big chunk of their lives.

I just wonder why on earth periods exist. Especially because if you take a certain medication, it makes the blood be reabsorbed by the body, and the body is totally fine. So there is no need for periods to exist at all

Yeah I know what you mean. Such a design flaw!

Something to do with Eve and an apple, I heard.

Yep. I have PCOS - periods are utter hell.

I saw a documentary which said that we need to have external menstruation so that our bodies are able to miscarry if there's something wrong with the baby, or if it would cause problems for the mother.

Not many animals are like us, annoying … though I’ve never had pain i admit

I was wondering about cats recently (I have a female) - when they come on heat (once a year) and get mated do they always have a litter? I mean humans can try for years having a period once a month and not get pregnant - can cats?

Theyre so annoying

Periods aren't supposed to be that painful.

I believe that as a society we're suffering from metabolic issues (all the garbage we eat), hormonal issues (all the endocrine disruptors in our environment), along with chronic stress, all leading to problems with our reproductive health.

For women, more and more are having painful periods. For men, sperm counts are dropping. Neither are a sign of a healthy population.

Anecdotally, I had painful and irregular periods, but a complete change in lifestyle (mainly cutting out all sugar and upfs) has helped massively.

God is sexiest and had no idea what he was doing when created us

We’re still getting punished

I'm not a doctor or a scientist, so this is off the top of my head, but if it's true that more women are suffering with painful periods, could that be because women who in the past would not have been able to have children at all because of gynaecological issues with a genetic component have now been able to have children with the help of IVF etc and have passed that condition on to their daughters? (Obviously this only works if they used their own eggs, rather than donor eggs.)

Another reason would be that women feel more able to talk about this now. When I was a teenager in the 1970s suffering with very bad period pains the general view was that you just had to get on with it and suffer in silence. Fortunately those days are gone. (I was diagnosed with endometriosis later. The great boon of being through the menopause is that I no longer have any problems with that.)

Unspayed cats oestrus cycle is about about every three weeks through the mating season (spring to autumn) and they can become pregnant or not if mated during the oestrus part of this three weekish cycle. They are reflex ovulators so ovulation occurs as a response to mating.

I often wonder this, it seems like such an obvious design flaw. I mean it's bad enough in modern society with tampons and mooncups and ibuprofen but what did we do when we were cave dwellers? Leaking blood all over the place seems like a bad idea.

Our ancestors wouldn’t have had monthly periods for years on end because they didn’t choose to space their pregnancies and plan the size of their families as modern women do. They would have become pregnant when fertile, birthed, largely had menstruation held off during extended breastfeeding, weaned, then become pregnant once fertile again. Rinse, repeat.

Of course they are having them - the gynae departments are a shitshow, and some people are waiting years to be seen then years for surgery

mine are excruciating but nothing will help them until I get the actual problem fixed
if someone had listened a decade ago when I said my periods are so bad, I might not be crippled with scar tissue everywhere

Especially because if you take a certain medication, it makes the blood be reabsorbed by the body, and the body is totally fine.
that's really not how any of the medications used to help periods works.

I had very painful periods as a teenager and in my 20s.

After my first child, they've become virtually painless and very weak.

I'm now pregnant with my 4th and final child and hope that this trend continues after giving birth.

Bad diets probablg dont help periods.

But i think the huge issue is a lack of womens healthcare . Its shocking.

Womens wombs change over time, and pain can mean something is wrong.

I used to have painfree periods, then all of a sudden mine became terribly painful. I went to the doctor and he told me he thought i had constipation.

I told him i can tell the pain is in my womb. He kept saying that he thinks the pain is in my bowels

Great typo! 😂

As a teen I was in absolute agony every month and my mother would shout at me that it was no reason to be off school etc, that I was making a fuss etc etc. she told me ‘if this is how you cope with period pain you’ll never manage to have a baby!’ Then I got pregnant and she was full of labour horror stories. I remember being confused at first how contractions felt like my period and assumed they’d get worse and it was only ever as bad as my usual period pain! I found it easy, my mother was annoyed that I didn’t struggle and after I had my baby i went on to be diagnosed with endometriosis. In hindsight it was obvious but at the time I had no idea and accepted that everyone had that much pain !

From an evolution point of view women had a lot less periods than they do now. Cave women presumably spent most of their adult life either pregnant or breastfeeding. And died at about age 28.

He may indeed be sexy 😂

As someone currently in pain, irritable, tired, and full of brain fog, on the second day of her period, I voted YANBU.

And sometimes would have been too underweight to have periods.

Evolution is a bitch.

I wish we were marsupials - give birth babies the size of a grain of rice, and when not having babies we have a handy pouch to carry our stuff in.