The Birth Control Incident

The cause and effects of stress:

1) I forgot to take my birth control on Tuesday.


2) I went to "catch up" on my dosage on Wednesday. (For those of you uneducated about birth control, you normally take one pill every morning. To catch up, you take the first pill in the morning, then the second pill at night. Voila! You are caught up, ready to take the regular dosage the next morning again.)

3) I went to take extra vitamins about an hour later on Wednesday night, but being tired, I thoughtlessly grabbed and swallowed the third birth control pill I had taken that day.

4) I did not panic until ten minutes later--because it took me that long to even register that I had taken three pills(!).

5) I managed to stay calm on Thursday, felt on edge most of Friday, but felt the need to express some tension on Saturday. So, I went ahead and expressed myself (and you can all send your sympathy to my poor, long-suffering husband).

Now, I was faced with the following questions:

1) Am I going to die? (It may not be apparent from this blog as of yet, but I have the capacity to be extremely dramatic. Also, I'm a hypochondriac.)

2) Have I had such trouble concentrating on all my reading this weekend because of the hormonal imbalances/fluctuations caused by my three-pill dosage? Or, is it simply because I was assigned to read literary theory by a man who clearly did not care at all whether or not his readers could understand what he was saying???

This is not the medical dilemma of the average person, this much I know. Is it even the medical dilemma of the average grad student?? At any rate, how would I prefer to categorize my episode of slight hysteria on Saturday? The female hormonal problem--or mental problems??

I'm really not quite sure which option portrays me in a better light, but I certainly wouldn't want to "play the gender card" as a crutch. According to Sarah Palin, if we women are discriminated against, we need to simply "work harder, prove yourself to an even greater degree" (watch the clip called "The Sarah Palin Gender Card" from the September 3, 2008 broadcast of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart at http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=184086&title=sarah-palin-gender-card).

There's the subtle political undertone for today's blog entry: see if you can deduce my politics from that statement. Meanwhile, I'm going to skip the rest of that literary theory and go back to reading A Tale of Love and Darkness. I didn't get very far yesterday because I decided that for the sake of my sanity, I needed to go to a beer-tasting party. Isn't it great when you can justify things like that? After all, alcohol just seems like the best way to top off my three birth control pills.