Shark Week

I've gone back and forth about writing this, because it veers dangerously close to the dreaded TMI Zone (or maybe it sprints headlong into it, I don't know). But I ultimately decided to go for it because stuff like this shouldn't necessarily be too much information. All right, it's not exactly charming dinner conversation, so here's a warning.

WARNING (I GUESS):

DO NOT READ WHILE EATING, UNLESS YOU DON'T FIND THE INNER WORKINGS OF LADIES' BODIES ICKY AND NAUSEA-INDUCING, IN WHICH CASE, READ WHENEVER THE DAMN HELL YOU PLEASE

There seems to be a prevailing mindset, even among well-educated women, that talking about our bodies is impolite, particularly when it comes to the menstrual cycle.

I can almost hear the clicks as people calmly but briskly close this browser tab.

(Aside: I think a lot of the reluctance to discuss what one of my college friends adorably-yet-slightly-distressingly refers to as "mensies" is related to strong cultural taboos against blood. Touching blood, bleeding - these things have almost universally been thought of as wrong and unclean. It's why bloodborne diseases tend to be thought of as especially bad, and their victims correspondingly cursed/guilty. Also, people think of menstrual blood as being "dirtier" than the blood inside veins/arteries. Must research this - I don't actually know what menstrual blood is composed of; I'm shockingly ignorant about my own body.)

This reluctance to discuss Shark Week (which is probably my absolute favorite slang term for periods) is silly. Most ladies spend roughly a quarter of their time (one out of every four weeks or so) dealing with a uterine lining that's given up the ghost. We all have to figure out the bizarre world of tampons and pads and cramps and upswings in emotional sensitivity. We all have to deal, at least once, with the nighttime dilemma of either waking up our partners in the middle of the night to strip the sheets off the bed or else waiting until the morning and hoping the spot of blood you leaked doesn't set too much into the fabric.

It's embarrassing. Maybe we don't talk about it because we hope that ostriching will actually work - if I don't think about it, I won't have to deal with it.

I know some women (womyn?) wax sentimental about the beauty of the menstrual cycle, how it connects us with the moon and with other women and is a reminder of the female superpower of bringing life into the world.

I'm going to go ahead and just assume that those women have painless, tidy, neat little periods that last for two days and occur at a fixed interval.

Bully for them.

But for the rest of us, it's inconvenient if not outright annoying. Listen, I understand and appreciate the miracle of the human reproductive system. But I can tell you for sure that it's gotta be the product of evolution because it's messy, circuitous, and inefficient. Or, okay, maybe it was created by a jerk god that likes to see its creations be uncomfortable.

Here's where things get personal:

When I was twelve, I remember coming home from school and finding a book on my bed. I wasn't too surprised; when my mom ran across books she thought I'd like at the library (where she worked), she'd drop them on my bed. However, when I got around to actually taking a look at it, I realized this was different.

This felt important, but it also felt a little weird. Like, I wasn't supposed to talk about it. I closed my door and paged through it. It's a great book - informative without being intimidating, candid without being intimidating. However, if my mom was expecting me to take the initiative to bring up questions and concerns, she was mistaken. The innocent method of delivery, perfectly fine when the subject was some frivolous scifi novel, was somehow an indication that this important topic was a little shady, like a silent drug deal or something. Like it was best to pretend it wasn't happening, to deal with it in private, and to present an unruffled face to the world.

Of course, I didn't have too many questions or concerns. It all seemed pretty straightforward. When you're twelve, you deal with mood swings and irritability all the time. It's a way of life. PMS wasn't a huge issue for me, and getting my first period was surprisingly businesslike. Here's a box of tampons and the instructions, here's a mirror, here's a stack of pads if you prefer.

Getting my period was mostly about learning how to keep the blood contained. I didn't have a big talk about Becoming a Woman, or about the Gift of Childbirth. Nobody took me out to dinner to celebrate it as a milestone. It was just another responsibility - one more task to add to the list of personal hygiene, like flossing or washing your face.

I don't mind this view. It's pretty much how I think about my period now - matter of fact, a thing to be dealt with. Of course, I don't plan on having children (if I want to raise a kid and turn it into a decent adult, I'll just adopt one of the kids that already exist on the planet instead of making another one), so the whole thing is really just a nuisance. How else should i view it than a burden?

Some women see this a betrayal of the sex - like not loving and embracing a week of pain and messiness every month makes me less of a female, like it's an expression of internalized misogyny. But it's not - I am fascinated by the biology, and I think it's amazing that some ladies put it to use and GROW HUMANS with it. But for me, the whole ovaries/uterus/fallopian tubes thing is about as useful as my appendix. It's a vestigial system. It's as potentially hazardous as an appendix, too.

Here's where things get really personal:

A couple weeks ago, I was caught unawares by a Shark Week that came out of nowhere. No preceding week of being hypersensitive to criticism, no cramps, no bloating. Just, BAM, PERIOD!

On top of being unannounced, it was also the. heaviest. freaking. period. I have ever had. I'm talking soaking through a heavy-duty pad every hour for four days and nights straight, and distressing clots, too. I told you it was personal.

Menstrual blood is not part of the circulatory system, so losing it doesn't normally make you faint or anything like that. But the body does depend on it for iron. Usually, women get a little low on iron during their periods, but you usually only shed a couple tablespoons of blood. When Shark Week is particularly gory, women run the risk of becoming dangerously iron deficient.

This happened to me. I started noticing it around day two - walking even short distances left me short of breath with a pounding heart. I scheduled an appointment with the gynecologist, who ordered a complete blood count (CBC). She told me I had extremely low iron counts, and that she was surprised I had as much energy as I did. She also said that, often, clots are caused by the body in an attempt to slow the rate of blood loss.

I'm on iron supplements for the next couple months in order to rebuild the stores of iron the body keeps in bone marrow. In the meantime, I'll continue to have a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath.

What's bizarre is that, two weeks ago, I had no idea this was a fairly common issue.

I texted a friend and asked her about it. We have a history of talking about things that you're not generally supposed to talk about, so this openness about Shark Week - though unusual by the world's standards - is pretty par for the course for us. She explained that menstruation-induced iron deficiency is totally a thing.

I feel a little indignant about this. This monthly mechanism should not put me at risk of anemia. Evolution was supposed to weed that out, although, stopping to think about it, cave-ladies probably didn't deal much with periods, because they were probably pregnant all the time. Fine, evolution, you get a pass on this one.

But I still feel a little betrayed by my body. A normal function it performs has rendered me a weak, winded wimp. A woolly mammoth would definitely have caught and trampled me by now.

I know this post has been kind of aimless. Blame it on the lack of oxygen in my brain.

Basically, I think it's ridiculous how ill-informed both men and women are about their own bodies, and the taboo against talking about those bodies' mechanisms needs to be overturned.