As wild as they are, the hot flashes I’ve started having the past couple months are easier than the hemorrhaging I was experiencing the last couple years. Depending on who you talk to, hemorrhaging is a sign of perimenopause and also caused by environmental factors. Lots of things potentially upset our delicate and nuanced moon cycles and this isn’t a secret. Corporations know their products cause hormonal and endocrine disruption, police forces and militaries know their destruction and chemical crowd control methods cause menstrual disruption. 

I’m putting it out into The Dreaming that we modern humans will collectively evolve to a place where the truth of our wholeness and connectedness to all things gets to carry its proper weight and then guide our society’s choices at large. Can we imagine for a sec how it might change things if connection to our environments and balance were no longer traded for profit – creating a cascade of chaotic health problems and disorders – but instead guiding how all of us lived on the planet? What else would change if we exalted harmony of hormonal cycles and it was no longer either arduous or happenstance to find solid information about menopause or menstrual disruption? It would be a different world, one that wouldn’t leave anyone behind but lift everyone of us up, whether or not we experienced menopause. 

The first time I bled irregularly was in 2020, a couple days after being hit in the calf with a flash grenade. I was 42. The blood came right after my period had just finished. As my leg healed, going from black and blue to yellow, I learned that crowd control chemicals were known to cause bleeding irregularities in women and AFABs. I tried to pursue this but it was May 2020 and the world was shutdown. 

The next time I bled irregularly was about two years later. I was traveling across the western US in my van and got my period at the normal time but it didn’t stop for 5 weeks. Instead, it accelerated and I filled up my cup in minutes to hours instead of a day. Low iron creates a vicious cycle: the longer you bleed, the heavier it gets. And after a certain point, there just isn’t enough beef liver simmered in barbeque sauce that you can choke down to make up for the iron loss, so the cycle continues. 

My van is comfy but the bathroom is primitive: a pee jar, a poop pot, and a shower at the gym. Hot water only happened by heating it and storing it in a thermos, which I never did. Not an easy situation for a regular period let alone ongoing bleeding. I was sleeping atop a washable chuck’s pad, as I did for regular periods, hoping my system would course correct on its own like it had before. 

One night, while boondocking out of cell range and off grid in the mountains near Santa Clarita, I got up at 2am to pee and change my cup. As I pulled the cup out blood gushed onto the cork floor of the van. I’d already been bleeding for weeks, from Albuquerque to Fort Collins, Utah to California. I was weaker and more light-headed by the day. I willed myself not to pass out but panicked as I cleaned up the blood. It was different than normal menstrual blood. It smelled strange and was separated into sausage clots and watery blood tea. I put a clean chuck’s pad on the driver’s seat and drove to the nearest ER, an hour away. 

After my personal information, the first question from the ER staff was if I was vaccinated for covid. When I said yes, the MA said they’d been seeing the same thing in other women who were vaccinated. Another staff member added that they’d also been getting reports of complete cessation of menses altogether post-vaccination. Back in Seattle a few weeks later, unprompted, Planned Parenthood staff would tell me the same thing. When I asked my ND about it, she corroborated and added that not only the covid vaccine but covid itself had been affecting menstrual cycles. But no one had any other definitive information and it’s hazardous to even bring up in many environments because there are only two kinds of information out there: conspiracies about vaccines or scientific facts stating that vaccines are a miracle cure and any other opinion or experience about them is anti-science and anti-public health, neither of which I am. Also, trying to find information without creating a wormhole of your algorithms is basically impossible, so for the most part I’ve just left this topic alone. 

So as not to cover the waiting room in blood, I was ushered into a treatment room almost immediately. The doctor who entered the small room was unimpressed by my dull bloodless skin and translucent teeth. 

“It’s completely normal for your age,” she said with a wave of her hand, looking down at her notes. She seemed perplexed I’d bothered to come in at all. “It’s just perimenopause you stupid woman,” she may as well have said. 

It was hard for me to walk a block without stopping to catch my breath, and the life was draining out of me a little more each day. I looked at her feebly. That was it? The winding down of my fertility was causing me to bleed out? 

“But I’m not gonna make it past the threshold if this continues,” I replied weakly. 

She shrugged and handed me another disposable puppy pad because the one I was holding around me like a diaper had filled up. I was sent on my way with thick winged menstrual pads that didn’t fit my thong underwear and some progesterone tablets. 

“Well, it’s either nothing or it’s uterine cancer. Get it checked out when you get home. Also, these might make you feel a little PMSy, but they should help,” she said, handing me the bottle of progesterone as she walked away. 

Synthetic progesterone made me feel like I was the size of a hippopotamus with the temperament of a honey badger. It slowed the bleeding which was good but I wanted to murder everything. And if we’re completely honest, that’s a weird tradeoff. 

The next day I drove to my sister’s house in West Hollywood and rested there for two weeks. I got almost daily acupuncture from the nearby holistic medicine school. The acupuncturists also gave me the stop bleeding herbal formula that was given to soldiers in Vietnam, which was very effective. The students and teachers were compassionate with me as I laid on the treatment table crying, releasing the fear and confusion from my system, as they put the needles in. 

Once back in Seattle I had several normal cycles and then hemorrhaged again. This time I bled for 7 weeks, and it was worse than before. I moved out of my van and into my mom’s guest room so I had a shower and a washing machine. I lived on a chuck’s pad. I did all the blood and urine hormone tests. My ND prescribed bioidentical progesterone, which for me, is totally different than the synthetic stuff. It creates calm, well-being, and great sleep without all the murderous rage. 

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), there’s an imbalance called ‘flooding and trickling.’ It’s one of the hardest things to treat because the cause is different for each person experiencing it. But it is treatable and because TCM is a complete system of medicine that conceives the human body as an interconnected system, symptoms that are confusing and seemingly unrelated for Western medicine, make sense and guide treatment in TCM. 

Where I’ve landed for myself is that the heavy bleeding was caused by whatever underlying imbalance was already present before I technically entered perimenopause, coupled with the stress of crowd control chemicals, living in a van, mixed with all the other stresses of being a modern person living through a pandemic. This viewpoint allows flexibility and space for lots of correct answers and avenues. As of this writing I haven’t had a period in three months. Medically speaking, I’m not post-menopausal. But I know soon, very soon, the coven of sagacious hags, their wizened arms outstretched in the moonlight, will welcome me into their inner sanctum of secret rituals and weaving of fates. 

I’ve written two other pieces on what’s helped me during this journey so far. Please follow the links below to read them:

The Life Process of Menopause

Menopause Resources

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash

Lincoln is currently in training as a Bodysex Coach. 

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