Hormonal Shift

So, I’m a woman who has had something of a sex life (insert appreciative sound here eg. phoar/and how!/woohoo!/get some! etc.etc.) and has been fairly obsessive over the years with contraception. Back when I went into my doctors aged fourteen with incredibly painful periods I got put on the pill and after changing pills a couple of times to find the right I pretty much stayed on it. I looked at contraception options when I headed off to uni and discovered I had choices from dutch caps (yes they were still an option then!), femidoms (just…ick!), the coil and the pill but percentage-wise it was either condoms or the pill for effectiveness. So I went for both, mainly because it wasn’t just pregnancy I was concerned with as pretty much only a condom will effectively stop STIs.

I came back from Japan and the pill started not to sit particularly right with me, my periods have been getting more painful and more hormonal over the course of the last four years. So this year I took another look at my contraception options. Well, dutch caps were out, injections and implants were in. I suspect were I eighteen then I’d go for an implant as the pill and it’s hormones used to sit pretty well with me. However, I wanted to get away from hormones being added to my system, it worked wonderfully well for more than ten years but latterly the base hormones must be changing so I figured I should probably stop adding more to the mix! More importantly all the options that weren’t the pill had actually caught up in terms of effectiveness and there was actually a realistic choice between them. So, after consultation with my mother, sister and cousin as well as female friends around the place I opted for the coil. Not the Mirena as that does contain some hormones and I wanted to totally get away from that, but the coil, nice little copper t-shape, I called him Lopez.

I have no additional hormones going into my system now, haven’t had for about four months.

I’m absolutely terrified.

These are some of the changes I have noticed over the past four months:

My skin gets screwy over my period now – this doesn’t bother me because whilst it was awful the first three months this seems to be clearing up quite nicely.

I get clumsier over the course of my period and the week preceding it – not a big deal, I always did.

My period is significantly longer. At it’s longest this has been two weeks with a two week gap between them, however this seems to be shortening and returning to a more normal cycle.
*TOO MUCH ICKY DETAIL WARNING*
The consistency of my period has changed, whereas before there would be a warning drip and then ker-splosion of the innards of my womb all over my, hopefully moon-cup but if I’d been caught out thighs/knickers which would last one or two days before easing back to dribs and drabs and drabs about three days later now it’s completely different.
I have three or four days of thick, dark dribs and drabs (this time I’ve had a whole week) followed by the niagara falls of bright red blood, no womb lining here just bright red blood and masses of it. I’ve been caught out a couple of times as before I only ever needed a regular or small tampon and that’d last eight hours…well they last maybe thirty minutes in the scaryness of niagara. So that’s a big super-big massive tampon or a lot of moon-cup pouring out. Niagara seems to be easing up, the first time it lasted for four days, this time only two. It’s the bright red colour that gets to me most about it.
*ICKY DETAIL OVER*

I was expecting a slightly longer period and I was told that it’d be between three and six months before it eased up, they seem to be easing up, so I’m ok with that more or less.

The amount of blood lost makes me absolutely wiped out for a couple of days which is new but not too bad.

The new thing that is actually scaring me is the amount hormones released actually give me mood swings. Now I’m not the most stable of people, but to go from quivering clingy sobbing wreck one moment to violently physically angry the next is not something I’ve ever had to deal with before.

Even in my teens when I had a temper and suffered Depression they were emotions I recognised as my own. When I get angry I get snappish and tense, egoistic in terms of my own views and with a refusal to admit any other arguments as valid. I don’t get the urge to smash people’s faces in and dance in their blood and brain matter. When I’m Depressed then the swamp consumes all and I become grey, now whilst I am likely to cry in the middle of the swamp it’s unlikely to be over a phone call at work and be hysterical sobbing. I’m quietly emotional not maniacally so. Hysteria, which I do occaisionally suffer from is more likely to be the result of hilarity or ritual than temper…

I have felt very little connection to this body and to my own emotions over the past couple of days, waking up today I suddenly felt almost as if I’d been away and I was back in it, the blobby, floaty feeling was gone. I also haven’t needlessly burst into tears or screamed blue murder at someone. Or felt as if I might genuinely commit bloody murder.

I’m hoping all this is my body getting rid of the excess hormones it’s built up over the years… but I have no idea, my periods were never like this in my teens, all I had to worry about was the pain not my behaviour. Ideas people? How the hell do I deal with this and will it go away? Does anyone else get like this?