I'm 42. I have three DC. Every month when my period comes it consists of:
- 48 hours of not being able to leave the house due to heavy bleeding, clots, flooding, pain and being doubled over unable to straighten.
- I cannot contain my bleeding during this time with period pants, tampons or a maxi pad. Even if I bunch up mounds of absorbent tissue or kitchen roll it often floods through that. Many times I have just resorted to holding towels between my legs and throwing them away once covered in blood.
- During the night I have to set my alarm to wake up every 2 hours so that I can go from lying down to standing up and run to the bathroom, sit on the toilet and empty the flooding blood into the toilet because if I leave it longer the built up blood floods on to the carpet, over the bedclothes etc.
- I get pain and nausea until I pass clots that are around the size and length of my thumb. It usually starts by feeling sick and thinking I'm going to have diarrhoea and sitting on the toilet and then passing a clot and the nausea and pain going away
- One of my DC who shares a bedroom and bathroom with me has to get up for school in the morning on these days and goes to the loo following a trail of blood and usually a bathroom floor covered with blood. As I often don't make it to the toilet on time so it leaks on my hands and over the taps and flush. I try to clean it up during the night after each episode but often I am just so exhausted I don't get it all, or wiping it spreads it further more thinly, so everything gets a red sheen and there are visible smaller clots everywhere.
- Mentally I go into an abyss of pretty constant crying and depression. I am on SNRIs which have helped a lot of the more extreme emotions, but I still feel like an alien has taken over my body. I fall out with everyone, I ruin relationships and friendships and work for 48 hours.
- I have never had a pair of (non lingerie) pants more than one month because no matter how much care I take they are always soiled beyond repair.
- Uncontrollable eating. I am on a GLP-1 and day to day when not menstruating I am really regulating myself well, eating healthily and not binging, but during my period it's like the effects of the GLP-1 wear off.
I have told my gynaecologist and GP about this. I haven't had time necessarily to give all the graphic detail like they above, but people respond to me as if I am vastly exaggerating. I've had scans where they have discovered polyps (not big enough to do anything about yet) and I also have the beginnings of adenomyosis which they also said was very common for peri-menopausal women. Most people tell me I just need to get a Mirena coil fitted and all this will go away. My questions for you:
- Does or did anybody else have the kind of experience I describe above on their period?
- What else can I do at this point?
- Is the mirena coil a cure-all for all of this?