The things in the first part of this post--down to the quotations are so similar to my boyfriend and I that I thought while reading it that he had written it. Thank you.
It makes me feel much better that someone out there has had my exact experience. I was on the same BCP for 10 years and the last month I was on the pill I had to change due to availability. Two weeks after I started taking the new pill I woke up with tachycardia and high blood pressure that waxed and waned for about a month and half. After my symptoms started I discontinued my pill immediately. I also found it difficult to work at this time so I was put on atenolol to help my symtoms which it did. I asked my doctor if she thought it was due to discontinuing BCP and she thought it was ridiculous. Currently I am being tapered off of atenolol and my symptoms have for the most part dissipated. I too often have thoughts of impending doom and get mood swings daily and have noticed decrease in appetite. I was wondering how you are doing now 4 years after discontinuing BCP.
ambertinks--I know how you feel. I had several setbacks while healing from BCP, and many times those setbacks felt worse than when I first went off it. Plus, my mind needed so much more healing than my body it seemed, so I was impatient when I discovered that I had to work on all those negative habits I'd acquired on my own. When those setbacks happen, try to use all the coping skills you learned at the beginning, such as the mood diary, happy letter, making sure you are busy so your mind doesn't have time to analyze, and etc. I know it's annoying to have to go back to them, but we all must do everything in our power to heal ourselves as much as we can.
As for me, and I don't know if this will help you or not, but I still needed help even after I healed completely. The past month I had was amazing, and even the month before that was pretty good. Suddenly though, this month I felt another depressed mood coming on and it actually lasted a few days, which has not been the norm for me lately. I finally decided that I needed to see a therapist. If for no other reason than to assure me that those negative mental habits don't serve a purpose. My decisions are extremely fact-based, so it wasn't enough for me to know I'm healed and to ignore the random depressed moods. I need an educated therapist who can help me learn how to prevent my bad habits, and help to remind me that I've made good decisions and that I'm not on the wrong path. My husband reassures me every day that I make good decisions and that I'll be okay, but being the facts-based person I am, I needed someone outside of my situation to tell me so.
I'm 16 and i took generress fe for 2 months and i stopped taking them and I've been feeling depressed, and I can't go to sleep, i'm not hungry (which is really weird for me)cause i love food. And ive been feeling really down and having terrible thoughts. I felt so alone but i'm so happy i'm not alone and i'm not losing my mind! Thank God!!!! Merry Christmas. This website just made my day!
Hi Girls!
First of all I want to thank you for posting your stories! It helps me very much, I really appreciate it :)
My story is similar to ours- I took Marvelon for 2 years and on September I switched to Daylette (I guess it's YAZ generikum). I was on this pill for 2 months- there were horrible- anxiety, panic attacks, depression. I stopped it after 1 and half month and expected big improvement. Unfortunately my symtomps are still here :( The worse thing is my doubting about feelings towards my boyfriend, I question EVERYTHING- every thought, every word. Everytime I see on the internet something about relationship, breakups etc. I started to feel anxious and scared. When I'm with him I feel a little bit better but almost all the time I overanalyzed everything. We are together for 3 years and I never doubted he's the One. Now I'm scared about our future together and It looks like I forgot we had beautiful time together :( I KNOW this is all because of hormones, I want to know this, but sometimes I just sit, cry and feel totally lost. I feel like stranger, I want my feelings back. I feel like in bad dream, I feel disconnected from everything and everyone. My obsessive thoughts sometimes say me that this is only because of my relationship :(
I can't imagine I will going through this for months.. I'm so scared I will ruin my relationship- not by breaking up, but even with this terrible thoughts. He doesn't deserve this :( He is so supportive and understanding but sometimes I even think something like "He is too nice"! :( I can't imagine I wouldn't think this way..
I have to say I felt better before 14 days, but since my period started I feel worse (although most women I read about felt worse only during PMS) I'm not sure If I should start new kind of pills to stop this hell.. I take Chlorella, but I don't know if it helps.
Sometimes I obsess about things like pill changed my mind or something..
Sorry for my English, I'm from Czech republic :)
Trust me, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I have had every single one of those symptoms since quitting birth control, and many other women have as well. There's a lot of discussion about this on Aphrodite's Women Health Forum under "contraception." Search through the archives of "the effects of stopping birth control" and "feelings for DH". You'll find lots of other women over the years with these problems. Birth control is poison! Quitting has taking a toll on my relationship and myself but I keep battling. It's been 9 months now but I am slowly (very slowly) getting better.
I wouldn't advise going back on birth control -- You're going to have to quit and go through this at some point so why not just battle it now? Plus you don't want to further mess up your hormones. Google information about hormonal imbalances. It's what we have. Also google about postpartum depression. It's essentially what we have, minus the baby. And take vitamins! Especially Omega 3 fish oil, vitamin b's and vitamin d. And go to the Aphrodite page that I mentioned. A lot of us talk there.
Good luck and stay strong!
I haven't posted in a while because I have been doin good but I have noticed over the past 2 weeks my negative thoughts are coming back and what really upsets me is that they are always about my boyfriend the thoughts I'm getting lately are oh u don't love him, or do you really want to move out again what happens if you feel like this when you two are living together. It's all "what if's" and it's killing me tonight I was telling my boyfriend how I felt and I just burst out crying because I can't cope with these thoughts any longer I really cnt they're horrible I should be celebrating tonight because its our 6year anniversary but I'm feeling so down that I'm in bed. Awww girls please write back I need some advice
Love Jen
JammyDodgers-- I know how you feel, but you WILL get better. If you have a happy letter, please go back and read it carefully. Also, talking to your boyfriend may seem painful, but it helps to have someone remind you that this situation is temporary. I've only been healed for a few months, but surprisingly, often those BCP moments seem quite far away. I imagine that, in a year or so, those memories will not cause me pain, but remind me of my strength and the strength of my relationship. I'm positive this will be the case for you too. I know it's hard/impossible to think positively during the rough times, which is why you need to remind yourself that this is temporary, your negative feelings are temporary. You have years of happy moments and feelings of love toward your boyfriend that easily exceed the negative moments you experience now. Please try to keep fighting it. You will make it through, just like the many others on here who have.
Thanks so much for your reply. Like I have started to take vitamins B12 fish oil omega 3 and multivitamin . I haven't really seen a difference. The one thing that just gets to me is dat I do not understand why my negative thoughts are always about my boyfriends it's frustrating :(
I completely understand. I too had negative thoughts that centered solely on my husband (then fiancé). I had negative things occurring in my life at that point that had nothing to do with him, but for whatever reason, that is what my brain decided to focus on. I didn't feel like I had any control over it, and the only thing that could comfort me at my worst was my husband. He had more faith in me than I could during that time. Thankfully, I trusted him and just kept hoping that he was right. He was. As always, he was able to see the big picture, whereas I could only ever focus on how badly I felt at the moment. Now, being healed from all of it, I can see how the BCP mess was only a microscopic moment in my life. It's nothing compared to the years I will spend with my husband without the effects of the pill. Sometimes, I just had to trust in something bigger than myself, though it was difficult to do.
Hello girls,
I'm SOOOOOO glad I found this post tonight. I'm 25 years old. I had been on Dianette for just under 2 years to help with spots, and prior to that I'd been on Microgynon for about 6 years. I came off Dianette 3 months ago and I can honestly say since then, it has been the scariest time of my life. I didn't initially consider the problems I was having might be to do with coming off the pill, as I did do a bit of reading before I came off of it, but I hadn't found this forum.
The biggest problem that has been worrying me is the vision problems - I've never had any problems with my vision before and they came on a couple of weeks after I stopped the pill. I have terrible vision in poor lighting - things up close seem to have the snow effect you get on the TV when there's no signal. I am seeing rainbows, halos and starbursts around lights - when I first started experiencing these things, it was coming up with Glaucoma or cataracts, but I have been to 2 opticians and both have said my eyes are perfectly healthy, though I do have a mild astigmatism (which they said people are normally born with, so if I was born with it, it has certainly never caused me any problems before!). As well as the weird things around lights, I seem to be incredibly sensitive to light, not even necessarily bright light, just anything with a contrast such as white text on a black background. Even typing this black text on a white background, there seems to be a glowyness. I'm getting after images of things, you know when you look at a light for too long and then look away and you can see a glowy blob for a while afterwards - well I'm getting that with anything with a contrast - the TV against the cream wall does it for me, or if I open the curtain in the morning when the room is dark, I get a glowy triangle of light that seems to stay with me for ages. I don't know if these vision problems are anything to do with coming off Dianette - I certainly hadn't considered it prior to reading this forum post, but I noticed a number of people have mentioned light sensitivity and blurriness. Mine isn't so much blurry but it's definitely not right. Has anyone else experienced the vision things like I have?
Another massive problem I've been having is the depersonalisation. I have been feeling really spaced out for a few weeks now. I had put it down to the fact that I started a new job 4 weeks ago and I also moved house at the end of October, out of the town I have lived in since I was born and in to a town 15 miles away from all my friends and family, in a quiet little cul-de-sac where you don't see anyone very often! The only way I have been able to explain it to my boyfriend is that I feel like I'm not really there for things that I'm obviously there for, if that makes sense. For example, we were at his mum's for the week over Christmas, and his sister and brother in law were there for a couple of days. They went home one afternoon, and that evening, it felt like they hadn't even been there at all. I couldn't put my finger on it but thought maybe it's just a build up of anxiety and stress. I've always had a bit of nervousness but I've never experienced anything like this before in my life. I got home from work tonight, my first day back after 10 days off. Spent 8 hours in the office, came home, sat on the sofa and I said to my boyfriend that it feels like I hadn't even been at work. It's such a weird feeling. Not only that, but driving home tonight I didn't feel like I was very alert and almost like I wasn't in control of the car - not that I was driving badly, but I managed to get myself home and wondered how on earth I'd done it as I didn't remember the journey. It's only when my boyfriend said tonight that could all this be related to me coming off the pill that I actually considered that it might be.
I had already stumbled across depersonalisation on the Internet when trying to work out why I felt so weird and out of control, but I thought it was more likely to be down to the fact that my boyfriend and I have quite a stressful relationship due to a rocky start at the beginning and also the fact that we both seem to have fairly demanding jobs. It was mostly saying that depersonalisation was due to some kind of trauma - an accident, a death or a major event in childhood, so I wasn't too sure if I was just over-analysing stuff. But certainly things and people that are familiar feel completely unfamiliar and surreal.
As well as the above, I have the ear buzzing constantly, though it feels more like it's coming from my head than inside my ears. I've had problems with my ears in the past - ear infections and fluid build up, but this buzzing is just a constant, very subtle high pitched hissing/buzzing noise, almost like the whiny electrical noise you get from an old electric item, such as an old TV - or the other way I can describe it is like when you've been listening to really loud music at a party or in a nightclub one night and you get home and your ears ring for a day or two afterwards... it's like that but very subtle - if I'm talking I can't really notice it, but when it's quiet I can hear it. This has been persistent for nearly 6 weeks now - no change of volume or pitch and it doesn't stop ever. It doesn't bother me that much but I know it's there and it annoys me.
I've also sometimes been emotional to the point where if I have an argument with my boyfriend, I don't even cry - I just feel empty and find myself staring in to space. I do seem to be crying LOADS though, even at stupid little things.
Ooh, and a weird thing happened tonight - I felt like my arms weren't there! Like they were weightless/numb, even though they weren't! I don't know how to describe it really but I felt like I could just float away!
Sorry for the massive post but I just wanted to get it all written down and out - so many things had crossed my mind that could be wrong with me - I had a blood test for diabetes before Christmas, which came back as normal, so then I started thinking things like I've got a brain tumour or some kind of mental health issue. I hadn't got as far as going to the doctors - the diabetes test was just in the local pharmacy, but I did think I should go to see the doctor.
I'm so glad to see people have got through this horrible time and I find it inspiring - maybe there is hope after all.
I hope everyone is feeling better - I realise this post was started some time ago but I'd love to hear from people who have got through this and also from people who are still getting through this.
Much love xx
I mostly post on the Aphrodite Women's Health Forum - google it and it should come up. There is a post on there called The Effects of Stopping Birth Control (part 4) under the Contraception section (I'd post the link here but it will just get taken off by the moderator). And yes, there are 3 other threads in the archive section that you can go through and see as women get better. A lot of them don't post anymore, probably because they're completely healed, but some have come back and posted words of encouragement. There are a bunch of us who talk there on a regular basis. My name on there is Sierra. Since many doctors are of no help (especially gyno's) we've been relying on more holistic medicine to help heal us. I see a Nutrition Response Practitioner... I would recommend finding someone who practices that, or see a naturopath or acupuncturist if you can. They are the ones that will admit (since they're not being paid a ton of money by the drug companies) that birth control can severely screw up your hormones. And what we've come to realize is that we basically have postpartum depression/anxiety, just without the baby! Your body is severely lacking nutrients (because the pill depletes them) so I would recommend getting on a b-complex vitamin, as well as some Vitamin D and some omega-3's (don't get any supplement with omega-6's in it as I have read they're not good for hormonal imbalances).
Hope to see you on the other forum!
littleskittle--I'm so glad you found this forum. Like you, I was extremely thankful to have found it back when I was coming off the pill. I have gotten through it, meaning that I'm healed from the hormones, but you won't see many women post on here who've healed. We all suspect that they're doing well and just don't want to bring up bad memories, which I can understand. I think everyone on here has their own little tips to surviving this ordeal, so I'll give you a rundown of what helped me (most of my symptoms were mental in nature).
Keep a mood diary, every day, no matter what. It may not seem like much help in the beginning, but you do start to see patterns of improvement, which are a great boost when you feel like you can't keep fighting everything. Write a "happy letter". On one of your really good/normal days, write a letter to your sad/numb self explaining how the "normal you" feels. For example, I would write uplifting messages about how much I loved my husband and why, because so many of my negative thoughts centered on him. Make sure to write in your letter somewhere that your negative thoughts are irrational. You really can't base anything on how you feel on those bad days, nothing is real, no matter how much it may seem to be. Lastly, find a doctor that will listen to you. Don't waste time with any doctor who tries to tell you that hormones have little to no effect on your body or that the pills aren't connected to your symptoms. So many women have given up getting any help because a doctor told them it couldn't be the pills, and sadly, they are forced to deal with everything without the aid of medication or even medical advice.
I hope some of this helps!