Okay, I am addressing this to all two of my readers, but does anybody else out there have experience with IUDs?
Much as pregnancy and childbirth were a surprisingly spiritual and fulfilling experience (I'm not even being sarcastic here), as soon as they were over I was very very sure that I didn't want to be pregnant again for a long time, if ever.
So as soon as possible I got an IUD put in. Not the copper kind that just give your womb an inhospitable metallic tang, but one that releases hormones to make sure that not only will my womb remain barren, but my periods will remain light. So far, it's a little slice of birth control heaven, but there are a couple of things that creep me out about it.
1) The hormones. Not only are they leaching into my bloodstream, and thus, anonybabe's, but...it just don't seem natural, ya'll.
2) There's something living in my womb, an antifertile gadfly, if you will, always making sure that my uterus is too busy hiking up its skirts to avoid touching it to have the time to grow a lining hospitable enough for a bambino. I'm all for sticking things inside me but this smacks of holding on to your shovelled parking space in winter with a random piece of junk. A little crass and again...not natural.
3) The brochure casually mentions that about 10% of women who use this form of birth control develop cysts in their uterus. 10%!!! Supposedly a lot of them just go away when you take the IUD out, but some have to be surgically removed. These seem like neither kind nor reasonable odds for my uterus.
4) Supposedly it is very very rare for something to go wrong with these things, but when it does it goes spectacularly wrong: ectopic pregnancies, punctured uteri, embedded IUDs that have to be removed surgically.
Would I rather take an infinitesimal chance that I will lose my uterus or a larger chance that I will accidentally gain a lifetime of love? When I put it that way....
Anybody got any horror stories about IUDs? Even fourth hand accounts? The part of me that really really doesn't want to be pregnant right now is battling it out with the part of me that thinks I should be a little more natural in my birth control selections.
1 comment:
Oh my gosh, I'm so tired and should be sleeping now but I probably have a lot more I could say about my IUD. But for now I will say that I have a copper one, i think ALL birth control (all that premeditation and worry) is unnatural including this thing inside of me, and personally I could go on and on about its sort of unethicalness but I feel that because it has helped and supported my marriage (the big thing being the removal of fear about how we would manage another baby with the lack of sleep that occurs) I have deemed it right for us, until next week or sometime soon when I get myself to the doctor to complain about bleeding 11 days out of my 28 day cycle and feeling iron deficient. We could surely talk more later about this and I would still have no perfect conclusion. Anyways, I feel you on this.
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