Let me give you a lesson on how they package birth control pills:
Generally, the pills are handed out in one-month (28-day) blister packs. This is supposed to be convenient for people who are taking the pills to avoid baby-making, since you can start on a Sunday and work your way through the pack, making sure you haven't skipped any pills along the way. There are generally three weeks of active pills and seven "placebo" pills, which don't do anything. These were put in there to make people feel "normal" by giving them something like a "period."
Periods are the most abnormal fucking things ever, and any bleeding you experience while on the pill is not a real period.
I digress.
The point of the placebo pills is ... well, there is no real point. You don't have to take them. Some people call them "reminder" pills, since they help you remember to take your pill every day, but there's no rule that says you need to take something that contains no active ingredients just because the company puts it in the pack. You can simply not take the pill, or you can (as some women do) go straight to the next pack and skip the fake "period" bleeding all together.
For some of us who have certain medical conditions, that's how we're supposed to take them. Skip the fake bleeding (which can be just as heavy and painful as a real period, unfortunately) and go right into the next pack. It's kind of annoying, at times when you don't have insurance, to pay $28 for 21 active pills, meaning you're paying for an extra week you never get. Even when you have insurance you're going to be heading back every three weeks unless you can get both your doctor and your insurance company to work with you and give you more than a 3-week supply at a time. Sometimes, if your doctor isn't clear, your insurance may not let you refill before week four, which puts you in a bind if you're not taking the stupid placebos.
So ... I hate those stupid useless little pills. If you can't tell. They exist for a stupid reason (bleeding that has nothing to do with ovulation and therefore isn't a period), and for me, just get thrown out at the end of three weeks.
Today I found a new reason to hate them.
I already mentioned before that these fake pills are often white, while the other pills are a different color. I just switched pharmacies, which meant changing from a generic that I've been using for three years to another, cheaper generic made in India. Which doesn't mean it sucks, but apparently they don't play by the same rules over there. I went from pink pills to orange, and I alternated them in my pill case to overlap the end of the last pack and the start of the new one. Pink, orange, pink, orange, pink ...
I didn't even think to pay attention to the placebos, because they're always very obviously not the same pills. And my old brand had a big fat stripe around the placebo week--in fact, I think whatever I used before it did too. I feel like it's pretty customary to identify the placebo week not just in the color of the pills, but in the color of the package.
NOT IN INDIA, APPARENTLY.
Today I started to feel sick--nausea and a headache--and I was having other ladyissues as well, which sometimes are just to do with my digestive system. I had a problem for a long time where I wasn't absorbing the pills well and I would get some withdrawal type symptoms on and off and on and off, all on account of inflammation and whatnot in my guts. I still have issues sometimes. My insides are very broken, and it happens. But I felt certain that there was something else going on, and tried to think if I'd forgotten to take any pills, or ...
That was when I realized that I had probably been taking my placebos, thinking they were the real thing. The active pills in this pack are orange and the placebos are pink. Not only are they pink, they're the same color pink as the active pills of my last brand. And it gets worse. Unless you're under some especially good lighting they look almost the same exact color. So when I put them in my pill case before going to bed, I didn't notice that there were two different colors going in there. When I saw a pill that seemed pinker than usual I thought it was just one of my old pills. And the packaging doesn't ID the placebos as placebos, so I had no reason to think that that's what I was taking out when I was just trying to get all my pills ready for the week.
Ugh.
On top of all that (pun intended), my prior pills put the placebo week at the "top" of the packet. These put them at the bottom.
It's a good thing I wasn't trying to avoid pregnancy, although I can't imagine someone wanting to have sex feeling as terrible as I have the last couple of days. I guess with the next pack I'll have to make sure to ditch the fake pills as soon as I get them home, to avoid any trouble like this again. It's one of those cases where I can say that it's partly my fault for not paying better attention, but also say that I've never had to pay such close attention in the past. Literally. Never. The pills I used to order from Malaysia were always clearly marked. (See, India. You can learn something from Malaysia.)
And I got to the end of this story and thought, "God, this would be a horrible 'how you were conceived' story." Good thing I don't use these pills for sexy purposes. (Unless you think alleviating pain and diarrhea and vomiting are tres tres sexy.)
