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My girlfriend (who is 22) started on a combined pill about two years ago, and it seemed pretty great. One year ago her father died, and the stress and grief of this has remained with her since. She was then (and is still) also having a very stressful time at university. In the middle of all this around 9 or 10 months ago, she went to get a repeat prescription but her blood pressure was way high and her doctor took her off it and put her on a progestin only pill called Cerazette. Everything seemed ok, but... In the last few months she's experienced a mounting degree of anxiety, steadily building up until in the last six weeks or so it's been extremely acute. At various times she tried to explain how she was feeling - essentially as though she was completely out of control of her worry and that it was like a kind of outside force or even demonic possession (this sounds overly dramatic but I assure you at the time it was no joke.) She was using words like 'crazy', 'insane', 'hating herself' etc. She was most frequently having panic attacks at night, fearing being unable to sleep. She has always suffered anxiety, but I've known her a long time and we've been together for a few years, and she really had seemed to be getting much more on top of it. About three weeks ago she started to wonder if the pill was having anything to do with it, and she had a look online at various forums and things and found a great many testimonials of women who had suffered very similar experiences while on Cerazette, and many were convinced that the pill was responsible. Most of them described having pre-existing anxiety, and stressful events in their lives around the time they were affected, but they all felt that the anxiety they were now suffering was much more acute than what they'd been dealing with previously. Anyway, we decided that she probably should stop taking Cerazette, and that we'd see what happened. I'm obviously hoping that her most extreme anxious symptoms will disappear, but I'm trying to discourage her from getting her hopes up too much, just in case it's not what's causing this episode. She's been off it for about ten days, and while we know that [if it is the cause] it'll take a while to disappear, it does seem as though there's some improvement. So, that's the background information/testimonial. I have a couple of questions on this issue that some of you might be able to help with... - Has anybody else either suffered symptoms like this and/or been on Cerazette with/without trouble? - Now that she's not on birth control, we're obviously using condoms. We've been monogamous and committed from the very beginning of our relationship, and took a long time to get round to having sex, so actually had never used them before. Neither of us like them much at all, for various reasons which I'm sure most people understand! Basically we're looking for other options, but considering how awful [we think] this pill has been, we're a bit wary about just going straight onto another. Are side effects like this common? Is there a pill which, I dunno... has a good track record for NOT causing this sort of thing? - We've discussed non-hormonal alternatives but she's pretty freaked out about the idea of an IUD, and most of the other options don't seem reliable enough to use by themselves... But neither of us really knows much about any of this stuff and so could do with some advice. EDIT: Should probably mention that we're in the UK, and while a lot of stuff is provided [nearly] free by our NHS, expensive stuff like Mirena ($850?!?!) will probably not be! Squibsy fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jan 19, 2011 |
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Jan 19, 2011 23:18
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:17 |
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