Female-type dilemma

[juthwara]

Okay, so I started back on the pill (the mini-pill actually) exactly a week ago. And guess what decided to show up today after almost exactly a year? My period. (And after 8 freaking weeks of post-partum bleeding too. I have now made up for every period I missed while pregnant)

I really wasn't expecting this. Breastfeeding can delay your period for quite a while and even if that hadn't done it, I thought that it would have waited until I got the inactive pills in the pack. But no, my body had ovulated and it would not be denied (gee, I ovulated all on my own - how novel!).

But as people who've used the Pill know, it's best started on the first day of your cycle, the day your period starts. I had decided to just start taking the pills because, as I said before, I wasn't expecting my period to show up any time soon. But now here I am, at the beginning of my cycle but a week into the pack of pills. So here's my dilemma: do I just keep taking them from this pack and have my period again in two weeks? Or do I toss this pack and start fresh with a new one?

I would go with option two without question except that my insurance gets really shirty about paying for prescription refills more than two seconds before I need them (Really. When I spent the fall in Michigan after my mother's accident and was only home every two weeks or so, I tried to fill a prescription six days before I needed the new prescription while I was home for two days and was told no, I had to wait until four days before the old prescription ran out. Of course, this is also an insurance company that believes the year only has 360 days, to judge by their 1 month=30 days rule of prescriptions). And I'm using a mail-order pharmacy, so it's a lot harder to argue with them or just pay for the prescription out of pocket.

I would call my doctor and ask, but well, it's Sunday and I don't think I would get the best reaction if I had my doctor paged to ask a question about the Pill. So instead, I turn to the Internets for help: what would you do?

Comments

[juthwara.livejournal.com]

Well, my concern isn't so much about timing the pill to my cycle as not having to bleed twice in a month. Timing to my cycle would require _having_ a regular cycle. But maybe that's a tad cynical.

In any case, I'm pretty sure it's a natural period. Two weeks ago, I was thinking, "Huh, that's a _lot_ of mucus. I wonder if I'm ovulating?" And then I convinced myself that I wasn't, since I'm breastfeeding, after all. Such is the power of denial.

I'm on the Pill specifically because I have PCOS, so I usually need the hormones to compensate for my own screwed up hormones. OTOH, my hormones are still running so high from pregnancy and breastfeeding right now that I don't think that's going to be necessary right now. So it's tempting to take a month off, if for no other reason than that another month might make it easier to take a pill that has to be taken the same time every day. At the moment, I'm lucky to take my morning pills by 2 in the afternoon. The only problem with that is that since breastfeeding screws up your cycles, the fact that I got my period this month doesn't mean it will come again any time soon. So I could grow very old waiting for my next period to come so I can start the Pill again.

So... I dunno. It won't hurt anything to take a pill tonight and decide what to do tomorrow, so I suspect that's what I'll do.