April 2007: Oh, That's What Your Period Is Supposed to Look Like

I thought I was good to go in April. Ten days after I ovulated (I was pretty proud of myself, to know that without peeing on a stick that literally, when you do the math, costs like $3), I started spotting. I’d skimmed enough of TCOYF to know that sometimes, when a fertilized egg implants into the uterine lining, a woman can experience “implantation spotting.” Sweeeet. A few months, not bad.

Only, the bleeding looked an awful lot like my normal period. Oh shit, it was. I had two days of light stuff, as usual, and then the heavy flow that always comes later for me. Followed up by a couple days of icky brown bleeding, for a grand total of nine days.

But I knew I wasn't supposed to be bleeding yet, so I started reading, on the message boards I'll discuss below. And that’s when I learned that a nine day period wasn’t normal. That this light bleeding at the beginning wasn’t actually my period, but “premenstrual spotting,” and the brown bleeding after my period wasn’t my period either, but “postmenstrual spotting.”

It seems so obvious now, but really, who knows that kind of stuff? It’s not like you talk to other women about what the blood looks like. “Oh, I get a couple days of brownish spots on my underwear when I start bleeding, how about you?” It seriously never would have occurred to me to have this conversation, but it turned out I wasn’t normal, never had been.

This is when the world of webMD and fertility message boards was first opened to me, as I sought to self diagnose. I learned my way around and got the lingo down, but to this day, I have stayed a “newbie” on the site I frequent most often. It’s a nice way of saying voyeur. I’d read everyone else’s posts and work myself into a panic—it’s not hard to do—convincing myself that I was going to spend the next four years in infertility treatments, only to discover I was beyond all hope. I think it was the emoticons that freaked me out the most: a little witch face for your period, or a big smiley face with wings for a miscarriage. It looked too harmless in comparison to how it felt. It was too eerie, like Chucky from Child's Play or something.

Or maybe it was the quotes some experienced users would put in their signatures, implying that the plague of infertility is actually a gift from god, to teach us to be better people. That at least made me think. After watching some of the nicest, most deserving people struggle to get pregnant and watching others who truly had no business procreating doing it without thinking, I became quite convinced that fertility or infertility is not a gift from god, but pretty much a matter of d.f.l. Dumb. Fucking. Luck.