I have taken pills every day since I was 18 years old. Well, I’ve been supposed to take pills every day since I was 18. The truth is sometimes I just don’t want to take them. Somedays the idea of being reliant on pills for my wellbeing is just too much. Somedays I just give up.
Let’s take things back to the fall of 2010. I was in my first semester at Northern Arizona University and had just had my first visit to a gynecologist. The entire experience had been nerve-wracking. Not just because visiting the gynecologist for the first time is pretty freaking terrifying, but also because I was visiting because at 18 years old I had never had a period. I was starting college, and yet I had somehow missed out on the quintessential after school special school-age female experiences of bleeding through my underwear, fighting with tampons, and worrying about trips to the pool. As time went by I had simply ignored the growing unease that something was wrong with my body until I finally had to admit that I needed to see a doctor.
I remember the day my mom told me about the results of my blood test. A few weeks before they had drawn 9 vials of blood with the promise that they would run every test imaginable to try and find the problem. That day my mom drove the 3 hours up Flagstaff in order to tell me the results in person. She sat with me in my dorm room and said “While they were doing some basic tests they noticed XY chromosomes. They thought they had made a mistake, but they didn’t.”
That day changed me in ways I am still discovering.
Annamathoughts 