Marriage and Cancer

Today at Kukio there was another wedding. I swear someone is getting married there every weekend, often consecutively on saturday and the someone else on sunday. All this beach wedding action plus my brother and future sister in laws' frantic wedding prep has really put me off to the whole thing. I may be desperate to make the man I love my family, but I have zero interest in wearing a pouffy dress and holding his hands in front of a crowd while some over-charismatic speaker leads us through a cheesy, religious, or cliche ceremony. 

Ideally: discreet but classy dress; an intimate party of 10-15; there's excellent liqueur and great food; I'm cozy in my partner's lap while people laugh and drink; sometime at the end we sign the papers with no show whatsoever. No photographer, no vows, no cake, no bouquet, and definitely no pouffy dress.

Before I fell in love, I was all about the party. Now that I'm there, I just want spend my life with this guy. Screw the festivities. 

In totally unrelated news I have high risk HPV and mutated cells on both my cervix and vagina. So there goes the IUD option. Instead of the 5 minute installation I'd been sweating about, I had a half hour biopsy where chunks of  me were snipped out while I cried into a tissue on the doctors table. Girls are so sensitive. At least I am. You spend so much time meditating on the position that the only person you want anywhere near that area is the man you love, exclusively, and then you have to lie on a table for thirty minutes and get violated by sharp objects. 

The conclusion is that I may have cervical cancer, I don't know what I'm going to do about contraceptives, and I don't think I want a wedding.

Bitchn' Bout Birth Control

I'm highly considering getting an IUD. The hormones from contraceptives make me crazy and give me cysts in my boobs. Not working. Anyone who knows me and knows this blog will also know that condoms ain't gonna cut it. The IUD sounds ideal, lasting 5-12 years either without hormones or just keeping them where they belong, in (your uterus,) but it's very expensive and apparently terrifying. Horror stories plague the internet of women who havent had children, like myself, and endure terrible pain, bleeding and cramping through a scary procedure involving a cervical clamp. *shudder*

It's not like I'm doing it because I WANT to- this is the other thing that's getting me- I'm doing it for my relationship. So we can continue to have sex, avoid conception for the time being, and not assail our union with emotional outbursts. I hate that I have to deal with all this and also keep it partially to myself. Taking hormones? Invasive procedures? Ouchy boobs and emotional roller coasters all because apparently BEING A WOMAN SUCKS, and contraceptives are completely our responsibility. 

If your guy was getting something painfully shoved up his penis for $500 dollars just to make monogamous sex with you safe wouldn't you feel like you should pitch in for the price? Or at least say thank you? 

I'm sorry, I'm angry. I blame the pills. I have an appointment on Thursday and my nerves are off the charts.

Doctors Confuse Me

About a week ago I was visiting my suspiciously eccentric doctor at the French version of Planned Parenthood to renew my prescription for oral contraceptives. I mentioned my UTI problems as this was before my embarrassing revelation of a few days ago. He wrote up my 3 month prescription and suggested that I go to the office "across the street," to another medical office, and get a test for some common vaginal infections and bacteria just in case they may be the cause. According to him, it would be free, quick and painless, and though it was likely to come up with nothing, it may dredge up a cause for my bout of urinary infections.

He wrote what I needed on a piece of paper to show to the doctor and told me to go next door and make an appointment. I did. Today, I went in, and was lead into an office... where I was pretty sure the same doctor was sitting. He acted like he'd never seen me before and, after all, I was in an entirely different building.. so I did the same. I handed him the piece of paper that I was pretty sure he wrote, describing what I needed and he read it again, like he'd never seen it before. The guy was really lookin' like the other guy.. and sounding like the other guy.. so while I nodded politely and explained all my personal details as though we just met I glanced at the name plate on his desk. Was it the same name??? I couldn't really remember. The minute he left his chair I dug around in my purse for any documentation from the first doctor that would say his name. Nothing.

When I got home I relayed my story of the duplicate doctor to TMI and we dug up an old contraceptive prescription. SAME NAME. Why did that guy write a letter to himself and tell me to take it to him? How exactly do you forget a Hawaiian in France with my terrible accent?

In conclusion the French medical system just confuses me.

Indepedance

This month is a slightly unusual month for me. Normally, like hundreds of thousands of other women, as I approach the 4th week of the month I start gripping my sheets and whining and kicking like a little kid, pleading that the universe grace me with just one more week, one more day, one more hour, before the dreaded menstrual cycle.

But this month, something flat out magical is happening. As I tweeted a few weeks ago, Yasmin oral contraceptives are around €5-8 a month in France. Without health insurance, one packet in the US is gonna cost at least $60. So! Before heading to the South week before last, I made a doctor's appointment, pretended to understand a bunch of medical French, picked up my prescription at the pharmacy, and have since been literally rocking on my heels waiting for the cramps to kick in so I know I can start the first pill.

I took oral contraceptives when I was younger and here is what I'm pretty much ecstatic about getting again: 1) WEIGHT LOSS. Dear god, yes. Just, yes. 2) Bigger Boobs. 3) Easier, more regular periods, and, the reason that started all of this, 4) TMI and I can have sex anywhere, everywhere, and all over the place. It turns out a mutual turn on is going for it where we absolutely should not go for it, (trains, stairwells, movie theatres, crumbling architecture from the times of antiquity) and fumbling with a condom is a serious mood breaker.

But this is all "silly and inappropriate for blogging." Ahem.

So what I really want to say is that, yesterday, I put myself on a bus that led me out of the medieval bubble I live in and into the civilized world, where, at the French equivalent of Walmart, I bought a printer. This is important because now I no longer have to venture into the stinking cave of B to print my exercises each week for my English lessons. This IS NOTHING TO SNEEZE AT. When I arrived in France, I was completely dependent on the guy: I needed him for food, French, a place to stay, moral support, everything. Now, with the purchase of this printer, I have at last snipped that last shred of umbilical cord that kept me connected to that mess of a person. And it feels great.