beware, gross-out period talk below

What an annoying day I had yesterday.

I woke up at 4:45 AM to the feeling of being stabbed in the uterus. Nice, eh? Perhaps this wouldn't have been quite as alarming of I were prone to painful periods, but I'm not. In fact, not only have my periods been very regular the past year or so, I usually get off fairly easy with the pain thing. Just a few zits and chocolate cravings and I'm done for the month. Keeping that in mind, here is some background information:
Remember how I said that my periods have been regular? Well, this month it decided not to come on time. I was 12 days late, man. 12 days. I peed on a stick, it was negative. I waited a few more days, then made an appointment to see the doc for another pregnancy test. My appointment was for Friday afternoon, the morning a woke up to the uterus stabbing.

So, I have a fairly high pain tolerance. But this pain was pretty awful. I was nauseous, I felt kind of feverish, and dizzy. I went to the bathroom and WHOOMM! I had started, alright. I called the nurse help-line to find out if there was something I should be doing, besides going fetal.
The nurse, who was an overly-happy-southern-gay-sounding guy, asked me some basic questions involving clots, degrees of pain, possibility of pregancy, etc. He decided that it didn't sound very serious since "we were having a normal conversation". When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that women who miscarry tend to be screaming in pain, and since I wasn't, then I probably wasn't having a miscarriage.

Because, you know, everybody reacts to pain in the exact same way, right? Psh.

Then he tells me to take ibuprofen, use a hot water bottle, and to continue with my appointment that afternoon just to get checked out. He also suggested, "Try drinking some of that herbal tea. Nobody knows why it works, but it does." Had my reproductive organs not been on fire, I would have laughed and told him that just because he didn't know what makes certain herbs "work", doesn't mean that nobody knows. Then I would have mentioned that "herbal tea" is a blanket statement, and not every herb helps damn period pain. But I just mumbled, "okay" instead.

So I called in to work, and slept until almost 11:00. The pain was less, but I was still sick to my stomach and bleeding like a stuck pig (well, that's not vegan!). I go to my appointment, and the nurse tells me that everything's normal, and I just started my period late. I reminded her that it's not normal for me to have piercing pain and pass clots, and her reply to this was, "Well, you're getting older. Things change." Now, it's not that I wanted there to be anything bad wrong with me, but I wanted more of an explanation then just "I'm getting older." I'm frikkin' 31 years old! I'm not menopausal or some shit. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.


The moral of my story? Don't call in sick to work just because you start your period. You'll end up feeling really stupid later.