Nine months ago, nearly everything in my life was as good as could be. I was a newly married to my favorite person on the planet. Finances were in order. I lived in proximity to family and had a robust church community and loving friend group. I felt fulfilled in my work, among countless other big and small blessings.
So why was I an emotional wreck?
I’d never felt less like myself in my life — anxious, ragey, and sad almost all the time. What was wrong, my husband and girlfriends wanted to know. I couldn’t tell them. The answer was honestly and truly nothing.
Nothing except for one teensy thing: a tiny round pill I ingested every morning at the same time for years.
My doctor had prescribed me the oral hormonal contraceptive several years prior as a Band-Aid for stubborn acne. At the time, I was exasperated, desperate to try anything that would work to clear my adult skin — when I learned about the silver bullet of birth control.
To my doctor’s credit, before writing the prescription, she ran extra blood panels due to my family’s heart history and the known risk of blood clotting from The Pill. But when my tests came back clear, I eagerly filled that prescription, blissfully unaware of the possibility of other mental and physical side effects.
Over time, they took their miserable toll — and in more ways than one. Beyond the extra emotional turmoil, I once bled inexplicably for
