AUDIO QUACK
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The humble condom and my cycle app has done me proud over the years, but it was time to find a less flimsy method.
I often wonder, like all women wonder, why men can’t do the birth control thing? Surely a sticky-paper-tube could be put up there that acts like fly paper? Or perhaps they could take a pill that would make their sperm lazy.
“Fancy swimming today, Mike?”
“Naaaah…”
“Yeeeeh. Me, neither.”
But, no. We have the science to put Katy Perry into space, but not to chill out sperm. So off I went, birth control shopping.
I was thinking, at first, to go au naturel (or as au naturel as possible) by using the copper coil. This is a T-shaped device that instead of seeping hormones into your body, it basically kills sperm with its copper ions. A sperm exterminator – a sperminator. How cool.
I began some serious medical research using Google. Soon, I found myself on the forum Reddit, where women from around the world had taken time out of their day to share their experiences with the copper coil.
It started out postivie.
“I looooove my copper IUD.”
“I’ve had mine since December and have really enjoyed it.”
But then it became less positive the further I scrolled down. Thier biggest complaint was how it intesified their Aunt Flow.
The verb gushing was mentioned a lot.
Gushing?!
One woman said she has had non-stop bleeding for 9 MONTHS.
9 MONTHS?!
Another ended her copper coil story with, ‘I regret it so much.’
Scared that I was going to drown in a puddle of my own blood, I decided to scrap the whole au naturel route, and instead, go for the hormonal coil.
I went back on Google to research the procedure of putting it in. A helpful nurse on Instagram did a demonstration with a plastic uterus and a coil.
“You just pop it in like so, and it opens up,” she said sweetly.
I grimaced at the screen. It seemed barbaric, and yet, she was so casual about it, as if she were demonstrating how to season a chicken. I returned to Reddit to find out how women felt about the procedure.
Someone asked the question:
How bad was your coil insertion on a scale of 1-10 for you?
These were some of the responses:
“9/10. My soul left my body. I saw a white flash of light, I’m not even being dramatic. I thought I was seeing heaven and was dying right there. The only thing I can equate the feeling to is having a white hot poker pierce me in the centre.”
“8/10 I went deaf and blind for a few minutes.“
“25/10. I vomited and kicked the doctor in the face and told them to get the f*** off me.“
Despite some women describing their experience as if they had been in a Game of Thrones torture scene, others found the whole thing a breeze.
“0 out of 10, for real”
“I didn’t even notice it.“
“Maybe I have a high tolerance because for me, it wasn’t as bad as everyone says it was.“
With that encouragement, I went ahead and booked the appointment. The next Tuesday morning at 10:02, I was shaking hands with my gynecologist.
She was everything you wanted in a doctor who was about to insert an alien object into you: warm, smiley, wearing florals, and had a collection of very serious certificates on her wall.
She asked me the usual questions at her desk, and then gave me a choice of three coils: one with a lot of hormones, one with not a lot of hormones, and one in the middle.
“I’ll go for the middle one,” I said, feeling like Goldilocks.
“Anything else I should know before we begin?” the doctor asked.
“Oh. Yes. I’m a fainter.”
I thought it was best to say, considering that only a few days beforehand, I almost passed out in the theatre watching Stranger Things. Not to mention the time I fainted at the hairdresser’s and again in the theatre during the performance of A Little Life.
“That’s useful to know,” she said.
She led me behind the paper curtain, where there was a serious leather chair with large footpads, monitors, and a tray full of tools.
I took everything off from the waist down, apart from my pink socks. I then put on the hospital gown and got into the dead-frog position, with my feet up and wide.
The doctor picked up her first metal tool. I gulped and concentrated on the ceiling, trying to dream of better places I could be. I was lying in a hammock in Bora Bora. I was watching a film on the sofa with popcorn on my belly. I was at a Taylor Swift concert.
The prodding began.
“So, going anywhere nice on holiday?” the doctor asked, trying to distract me.
“Um, no plans,” I squirmed “What about you?”
As she prodded away, she calmly talked through her holiday plans. She was going to Greece. No, she had been to Greece. She was going to France, I think. I don’t know. I wasn’t listening as I was acutely aware of what was about to happen.
Suddenly, pain shot through me. It was like a very, very small, but very, very real crossbow had been released inside. Boof!
….I didn’t faint like I fainted in A Little Life (nothing is more traumatic than that show), but I was close.
“Sorry,” I said in a hushed voice to the doctor, aware that I sounded very dramatic, like I was a dying person in a movie.
“This happens all the time,” she reassured me. (They really should look into this fly paper birth control for men.)
I was taken down the corridor to the recovery room with my pale ass hanging out of the back of the gown. (In those moments, I wished I had done squats.)
They gave me some water and a ginger biscuit. It took around an hour for my blood pressure to return to normal and the cramping to subside, and then I was let back out into the world with my coil and a high rating to contribute to the Reddit forum.
On the bright side, at least I didn’t accidentally kick my doctor in the face.
(For any women curious about the hormonal coil, it has been two weeks, and everything has been fine so far. You can get more information about birth control here.)
THE QUACK 