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She was just married last week. She just passed her bar exam. She was in perfect health.
I saw her husband, a young neurologist, laying his head on her shoulder. She was just laying there with a ventilation tube in her bleeding mouth. I'm not one to get worked up about things, and I'm pretty unaffected by most things I see, whether in the hospital or anywhere else, but...I don't know. This is pretty saddening to write about. I don't know whether I'd consider her really alive or whether we're just oxygenating the blood of a nearly dead body to keep its organs viable; but I think I, too, would take the chance to feel my wife's warm body until she leaves me.
I spoke at length with the vascular technician who worked with her, performing the tests that diagnosed her condition. She said she was so shocked by the whole situation. When she tested her the woman was literally laying in blood. The first thing she credited it to was birth control pills. She said she doesn't know what they're doing to them now, but you never used to hear of this. We also talked about the 19-year-old we had recently who threw a clot after being on the pill for three months. At least she got to go home with the admonition to avoid the pill.
I came home and told my wife I'm glad she doesn't use them. My wife and I are not that far from thirty.
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The first thing she credited it to was birth control pills. She said she doesn't know what they're doing to them now, but you never used to hear of this.
This site, sponsored by Public Citizen, the consumer watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader, claims that some of the "third-generation" (how weird etymologically, to think of contraceptives having "generations") pills are twice as likely to cause clotting as the older, "second-generation" ones.
And here it gets into the reasons behind the switch from the older, apparently safer formula:
Combination oral contraceptives contain both estrogen and progestins. Second and third generation oral contraceptives (OCs) differ in their progestin component. Third generation OCs contain desogestrel (available in the US), or gestodene (not available in the US), while second generation OCs contain norgestrel, levonorgestrel, norgestimate[*] , or norethindrone. Third generation oral contraceptives were developed in the 1980s with a goal of producing an oral contraceptive that had less androgenic adverse effects such as hirsutism and acne typically associated with the first and second generation oral contraceptives.
And then there's this:
The increased risk of death from a pulmonary embolus for women who took levonorgestrel OCs was 5.1 to 1(compared to non pill-users), but the risk of death from a pulmonary embolus for women who took desogestrel or gestodene containing OCs was 14.9 to 1.
So, if the study's right, we're talking about the third-gen pills essentially tripling your risk of this mode of death compared to the earlier version, and multiplying it by fifteen as compared to someone not on the Pill.
The scary thing was that the site was pro-pill, and was using this statistic to bolster the fact that the current pill "only" causes about 10 in 100,000 cases of DIC.
I've actually got two other stories about pharmaceutical-induced trauma from the past week.
Last week, a guy at our workplace had a stroke in the office and was taken away by EMS. He was revived and is now recovering at home. Apparently in the weeks prior to this, he was on a medication that made him "feel drunk". In the week before the stroke he had been taken off the medication; I'm guessing the withdrawal must have had something to do with it.
And Monday, a child in the 1st grade class of one of my wife's coworkers decided to hang himself. That's right...the child's mother and brother walked in on a seven-year-old preparing to hang himself. ADHD medication is such an innocuous thing to call it.
WT---?!
MESSED UP.
*sighs*
I dun wanna raise my kids in this scary world =/
I always talk to Sean about how birth control pills should be a social justice issue for women.
You hear about all these drugs that are taken off of the market because of the *possible* side effects, such as stroke, etc. Like that drug for elderly people that was pulled not too many months back. It seems that when it comes to just about any other medication or drug, the standards are so much higher - or at least when the drug starts killing people or giving them cancer, there is a class action suit and/or the drug is discontinued.
And yet, for some reason, we women are allowed a drug that can basically give us cancer and kill us - and yet it's allowed on the market. The pill, Plan B, these stupid new pills that only give us four periods a year... I swear... how is this NOT a social justice issue?
While these are by no means AT ALL inconsequential things, they don't quite correlate to the well-known risks of the pill for blood clots, increased risk of stroke, and possible increase in breast cancer, etc. Not to mention the deaths that have occurred after some people have used Plan B, etc.
So why does the majority of the contracepting female population seem to think these side effects are acceptable, but anxiety and panic attacks aren't? Could the desperate need for sex, free from fear of pregnancy, really be so important that women would risk their lives? LAME.
I don't think the mood side effects are negligible, either. I'm constantly hearing anecdotal accounts of women who feel entirely unlike themselves, can't stop crying, etc. on HBC. I wonder how many relationships and marriages fail because the woman became a hormonal-emotional wreck on the Pill.
I was already depressed when I started taking them (again, the thyroid), but I was literally suicidal before I stopped taking the meds (since they didn't fix anything anyway).