Bye-bye Mirena: No More Orc Weapons in MY Uterus

December 15, 2007 at 9:50 pm | Posted in Women | 12 Comments
Tags: Contraception, contraceptive coil, Feminism, Gender, Health, Hormones, Mirena, women's health

Yesterday I finally had the Orc weapon that goes by the name of Mirena removed from my uterus – it had been sitting there for 10 months and giving me all interesting sorts of pain. Even though it is a very convenient and effective form of contraception – thanks to the hormones it gives off, and also thanks to the pain it induces which doesn’t really make you feel sexy – I have finally decided that that isn’t worth the torture. The first month was characterized by tidal cramps, followed by several months in which the cramps vanished to an xtent that I could feel the sting more clearly that the instrument caused on both side (probably the entrances of the uterine tubes – the coil is T-shaped, the uterus, however, isn’t…).

Come June/July, the cramp attacks renewed – I am not very tolerant to pain, or rather, I may be able to tolerate it, but I can’t fail to notice all of its shades (my boyfriend might say I am paying too much attention to them, which I probably am).

I remember various incident, one where I was sitting in a beer garden with a friend, where the pain was so unbearable I had to try very hard not to curl up and grunt in public. I started using pain killers for cramps more often – in Austria, you cannot get these without a prescription, so whenever I went to Germany I stocked up on Buscopan and made sure I always had some in my pockets to ease the pain when it started.

The hormones in the coil sort of make your period go away – in my case, it was reduced to a very faint, yet all around the month bleeding. The pain also came and went as it desired – regardless of conservative monthly bleeding patterns.

Using my pain killers, I managed to keep the cramps under control. Unfortunately, they didn’t help to get rid of the sting that I felt somewhere leftish in my nether regions – a sting that, curiously, sometimes made walking a bit painful. Eventually, it was there 24/7 – I felt it when I woke up and sometimes it stopped me from going to sleep. It’s a rather uncomfortable situation – knowing that some piece of plastic is stuck somewhere in your uterus and somehow dislocated or generally unfit for your body (else it wouldn’t hurt, right?).

So I finally, finally picked myself up and made an appointment at a gynecologist – not exactly happy about it, because the whole process of placing the thing in my uterus was already extremely painful. And I got news that was even worse: My previous doctor had cut off too much of the thread on the coil which is supposed to be used to remove it. And with no thread in sight, one would first have to search a bit for the thing (i.e. widen the cervix, and try to find and pull out the thing with a kind of crochet needle).

Too cut a long story short: We managed to get the thing out, with the help of my cherished yoga breathing techniques to distract me from the pain and that of the doctor’s wife who came in and whose hands I was allowed to pinch as hard as I needed it.

Mirena may work for some – it didn’t for me. Some say that women who haven’t given birth shouldn’t use a contraceptive coil because complications might render them infertile. I say: Women who haven’t given birth shouldn’t be given a coil by their doctors, because the inapt Mirena thing only comes in ONE size – and there’s simply not enough room in a virgin uterus to accommodate the coil generously enough.

Aren’t we living in an era of micro-gadgets? Is there no way of making the damn thing smaller? More flexible? Why isn’t it part of the package that the doctor first defines the size of the uterus and then selects the custom size contraceptive coil?

Because contraceptive coils are for WOMEN – you’d be surprised how quickly they’d come up with a customized solution if ever a MAN would have to stick a little peg up his prick.