The Time I Failed at Birth Control

Now that I have finished telling the Napoleon saga, I feel like I would be bereft to leave Monday’s posts open to something other than enjoyable (potentially horrific) dating stories.  Fortunately for me – and distinctly unfortunately for you – I’m starting to run low on stories.  There are a year and a half worth of stories about my first love – but (1) I won’t write about that without his expressed permission, and (2) it was so long ago that I don’t know if I could remember much.  What I do remember (enough to blog about) are the sweet, sappy, and incredibly fun times.  Which, let’s face it, doesn’t make for very good blog reading.  Conversely, there are months worth (so far) that I could write about The Owl, but again (1) I won’t write about that without his expressed permission – or until we stop talking forever, and (2) it’s too cute and you’d vom all over your keyboard or phone or whatever technology you use to read this filth.

So in lieu of starting a new series this Monday, I will delight you instead with the lovely story about how I almost overdosed on birth control pills (not where you thought this post was going based on the title, huh?)  And to any family members reading this, this would be a good time to stop.  Thanks.

Many years ago – we’re talking close to a decade prior to now – I met and had a brief fling with a Kevin.  Kevin was wildly attractive in a delicate way.  I don’t know how else to describe him.  He was somehow a combination of being ruggedly handsome and also seeming like a poetic artist.  I fell fast and I fell hard.  We spent every night together (and a lot of the day time) for about 3 weeks before unrelated circumstances would take us away from each other.  We cried.  We kept in touch.  We talked on the phone, texted, emailed, sent CDs to each other in the mail.  But it wasn’t much more than a few months before we realized that this was our slow taper to an ending.  An ending, that by my opinion, was extremely unfinished.  I’m not typically a hopeless romantic, but some part of me thought we would find each other one day and remain in each other’s lives.

Here, I made you a mix tape. Love you forever?

A few years later he popped up on my facebook feed and I sent him an email just to see how he had been and what his life had directed him to since we had last spoken.  Within minutes I’d received a response and we fell back into chatting away about everything as though not a minute had gone by since those original 3 weeks.  But as things always seem to do, the emails tapered off along with our contact.

A few years later… same story, different setting.  We began emailing.  He was travelling for work.  I had moved to Florida.  We talked about dating, relationships, work, goals, living situations, things we thought would have happened by now and things we never saw coming.  We talked about family.  We talked about friends.  And then we talked about me visiting him.

A week later I had plane tickets booked.  Two months later, he was newly single and picking me up at the airport.  Two months and a few hours later we were locked in a tangled mess of limbs, hair, sheets and laughter.  It was as though not a minute had gone by since those original 3 weeks.  Everything just felt right.  Perfect.  Like this was exactly where I was supposed to be.  Nothing could bring me down…

…until he got up and went to the bathroom to clean up and I rolled over to see the faintest of pink tinted spots right under where I had just been laying.  My look of horror hadn’t left my face when he came back because he followed my eye line right to the spot and – in the most gentlemanly way possible – pushed me off his bed onto the floor so he could wash his sheets before I ruined them.

I had been so involved and enraptured by the idea of seeing him, I had totally forgot that I was scheduled to get my period two days later, but at that time in my life I had just gone back on the pill and was decidedly shitty at taking it on time and, as such, my body hadn’t quite synced up with the hormones in the Ortho TriCyclen Lo I had been taking.

As soon as I got up and put clothes on, I ran to my bathroom bag, grabbed out the pill pack and saw that I had missed about 6 pills within the previous month…and in a bout of obvious genius, took all 6 immediately.

Without getting too medical on you, here’s a thing you should know about birth control pills: skipping your period by continuing to take hormone pills instead of placebos is FINE, provided you are on a monophasic pill (i.e. one with a constant stream of hormones in each pill…. not triphasic where each week of pills has a gradual increase in hormones) and also provided your birth control isn’t one that is specifically using LOW LEVELS OF HORMONES.  So, I have no fucking idea what I was trying to do taking 6 pills at once, but desperate times… I guess?

Well here’s what happens when you take 6 birth control pills of varying levels of hormones at once: EVERYTHING.  Everything happens.  PMS happens, mood swings happen, bloating happens, dizziness happens.  You know what else happens?  Sometimes you STILL GET YOUR G. D. PERIOD.  Lighter, sure…but it’s still there.

The rest of the weekend I was an emotional wreck.  I THINK I told Kevin I loved him.  Poor guy.  We continued to get it in, but I had the pleasure of laying on triple layer of towels like a sick cat.  I’m glad that, of all people, it was Kevin who got to ride my Ortho TriCyclen-coaster because I’d always been exceptionally comfortable with him.  There is really only one (maybe two) other people I’ll bang on a towel for, and Kevin was perfect at acting like it was just the normal thing to do that night…

…but if there was ever any indication that our happiness was probably best reserved to those first 3 weeks of obsession, I think that weekend may have been it.

We’ve been in touch here and there since (and it’s been a few years…again) and we email back and forth and catch up on each other’s lives, but it no longer feels like no time has passed.  It no longer feels like we’re waiting for fate to bring us back together.

Now it just feels like I almost ODd on birth control pills to have sex on a towel with a dude I’ll probably never see again.  And for the purposes of blog posts like this, I am perfectly okay with that.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, shortly after that incident, I changed birth control pills to a monophasic one.  Because, science.