Full stop
Body + Soul, Sunday Telegraph: November 4, 2007

What’s it like to have a cycle just as nature intended? After 10 years on the pill, Johanna Hegerty decided it was time to find out.

“What do you mean you’re still on the pill?’

The music stops and the everyone stares, mouths agape.

“Do you realise that you haven’t ovulated for ten years?” my friend says, as the women around us start pressing in with their stories. “I was a psycho…”, “I’m actually a size ten…”, “Depressed…”.

“I thought I was infertile,” my friend continues. Before I can remind her that she’s mum to a beautiful three-year-old son, she explains: “I didn’t have a period for nine months after I went off the pill so we assumed the worst.”
Weeks later, the hangover all but forgotten, memories of that evening are playing on my mind. What did my friend mean when she said I hadn’t ovulated in ten years?

I decide to go back to where it all began. Sitting in my GPs office, I flash back ten years ago when I sat before a different doctor – my mum’s – and nervously tried to pretend that I needed the pill because of painful periods.
“I want to go off the pill,” I tell my current GP.

“OK,” she says and explains that there’s no medical reason for me to stop taking it. “But lots of women your age decide to stop taking the pill to get into touch with their natural cycle,” she tells me.

“What usually happens?” I ask.

“Well, they tend to get pregnant.”
It’s not what I want to hear. Getting pregnant is definitely not the objective here.

“So what is the objective?” my doctor asks.

Primal instincts
Considering giving up the pill is a bit like realising I’m wearing an itchy jumper. The more attention I give it, the worse it gets until I reach the point where it’s just got to end. My doctor says I can stop taking the pill after my next period. There’s just one more hurdle.

“It means more sex,” I tell my bewildered other half. He thinks it’s a trap or some kind of reverse psychology, but I try to explain the link between the pill and a lowered libido.

Using cardboard toilet rolls as cave people and mobile phones as us, I give him a visual explanation of how pheromones work.

“You can’t smell me,” I say, as his Nokia ignores my Ericsson. Meanwhile, our cardboard counterparts are going for it, lured together by the scent of primal hormones secreted by the female (and eliminated, apparently, by the hormones in the pill).

I can’t pretend that sex is the only reason I want to give up on the pill, but I’m not sure how to explain the other reason, even to myself.
“I’ll just feel better,” I say.

Pill stopping
My first Monday morning without the pill, I feel a little vulnerable and totally at the mercy of myself. At eleven o’clock, my heart skips a beat when I realise I’ve “forgotten” to take my pill. This will carry on for a few weeks yet. Even three months down the track, I’ll reach into the cabinet looking for the foil pack that used to sit by my toothbrush.

Now that I’ve started this journey, I’m wondering if there’s anyone left who does take the pill. It seems that every woman around my age has given it up and is happier for it. Alex no longer hates her husband at three o’clock every afternoon. Fiona tells me, “You won’t know yourself.” Emma warns of nightmares.

It takes a while for my own hormones to kick in again. The oestrogen in the pill is a synthetic version, and when my own hormones return, it’s enough to make me want to go on the pill again. I’d come to accept my mood swings as they worsened over the past few years, but this dummy spit is like a natural disaster in its intensity and comes without warning or respite. To make matters worse, I’ve got zits on my chin and my hair is greasy and unmanageable. It’s like going through puberty again and I’m not happy. So much for more sex, thinks my even more bewildered partner that week as he spends a lot of time on the balcony of our now too-small flat.

This is normal, says Lara Grinevitch from Sensible Alternative naturopathic hormone clinic. A blood test shows that my oestrogen is severely depleted and will take a while to build up again. Meanwhile, I ride the storm, which is – truth be told – only brief.

You see, it turns out that I’m one of the lucky ones. In fact, I’m practically a poster-girl for the pill. After three months, my cycle has returned to a totally healthy, normal 29 days and I feel balanced, womanly and more in tune with my body than ever before.

Back when I was at uni and had little to no interest in anything other than my boyfriend, Midori and existentialism, I had a vague understanding that the pill tricked my body into thinking I was pregnant and that was it. Hey presto: the perfect contraception.

Grinevitch says she’s mystified as to why women take the pill so casually without wanting to know more about it.

“We agree as a society that taking steroids is a bad thing, yet the pill is technically an oestrogen steroid. The chemicals in the pill are not equivalent to human hormones and cause more than 150 chemical changes in the body, most of which are not well understood,” she says.

“Women taking the pill are almost twice as likely to suffer from depression,” Grinevitch continues, “and there is evidence progestin can affect bone mass. She sees a lot of women who fail to ovulate after taking the pill for a number of years. They often have elevated testosterone levels and chronically suppressed oestrogen, and can experience problems with their insulin uptake or have a suppressed thyroid.

One of the biggest shocks for me is to learn that I haven’t had my period in ten years. “The fact that bleeds happen once a month is completely arbitrary,” says Grinevitch. “When the drugs were first designed, the scientists felt that having a monthly period would somehow make it more normal for a woman. What you experience on the pill is a withdrawal bleed, not a menstrual period.”

Feeling better
So now that I’ve got my menstrual cycle back and it seems to be in working order, there’s one major issue to discuss: sex. Has it improved?

Well for the first few weeks, going off the pill certainly lifted the bar as we were suddenly forced to be a bit more creative. It didn’t take long, however, for the novelty of prophylactics to wear off. The baffled other has tried to be supportive, although it’s something he will never really understand. I think he hopes this is one of my whims, like giving up caffeine or soaking my muesli overnight, but as we start looking at other options, such as the symptothermal method of contraception, I can’t help feel that sharing the responsibility is a small victory for me. 

Together we’ve had to accept that beneath the cloak of contraception, I’m not actually a nymphomaniac and there are still (plenty) of times when I’m just not in the mood. Coming off the pill is no magic bullet solution – all those little annoyances still exist, although I no longer think black, murderous thoughts involving ice-picks, and the feeling is brief and passing, rather than all-consuming.

The strangest side effect I’ve had since stopping the pill is that I am no longer a nail biter. Grinevitch says the pill affects the neurotransmitters and anxiety symptoms, which could explain this.

Three months and two periods after stoping the pill I do, for the most part, “just feel better”. I’m slimmer, calmer, feel more rational and am more responsive to my toilet-roll companion’s advances.
He comes into my office and says, “You smell nice”.
“I’m not wearing any perfume,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says.

Visit www.sensible-alternative.com.au to contact Lara Grinevitch or learn more about natural hormonal balancing.