Apparently I’ve volunteered for an unpaid medical research study.

This is kind of like donating your body to science, but while you’re still alive. This gives you the lucky bonus of being self-aware enough to recognize that those working on you are just as clueless as you are as to the cause of your illness.

I guess it’s kind of like being a detective. You take your clues (in my case, a 102° fever, tonsils slightly smaller than golf balls, throat gunk and soreness, dehydration, nausea and vomiting, and an aching everything), apply what you know (which, in some cases, wasn’t much), and pronounce a treatment.

And it was so much fun that I decided to take some PTO days from my honeymoon so that I could do it all again. And boy, what a good decision that was. Because who doesn’t love spending entire days prostrate before the toilet, watching the Olympics on the TV that your gracious fiance moved to the bathroom doorway to keep you company?

By the end of everything, I’ve had at least six nurses, five ask-a-nurse phone calls, four prescriptions, three physicians, three big-ass insurance bills, two urgent care visits, two blood tests, one hospital visit, one catheter, one IV, and zero diagnosis. But hey, if you’re cured, it doesn’t really matter what was wrong… Right?

And all of these physical adventures wouldn’t have been so bad if I wasn’t concurrently experiencing a mental health yo-yo. Regardless of the stress that comes from getting engaged, planning a wedding, and buying a house, this is truly among the happiest times of my life. (It’s okay if you want to gag a little. The corner of my mind that’s still “single-Jenn” wants to.) However, from the moment I started my birth control regimen, I started feeling increasingly flat, teary, unhappy, unmotivated, and, above all, unlovable. (I know some of you may be like, “Wait, Jenn! You’ve complained of feeling this way so many times before. What separates this from your normal?” Well let me tell you.) These feelings continued everyday without letting up until I went on the sugar pills. Then it was like everything reverted back to normal. I was happier than I’d been all month. So I tried a different kind of pill. It was even worse. I’d cry for hours about everyday things like, say, getting out of bed or cooking dinner. Needless to say that pill lasted four days. And, again, 24-hours after taking the pill, I felt like I was getting back to normal. I’m now on my third concoction of hormones and the effects are the same, though reduced from what they were before.

This is, from the anecdotes I gather, not an uncommon phenomenon. From what my doctor told me, it has to do with the hormone progesterone and its clever capabilities as a serotonin inhibitor. (Which, since progesterone is produced in higher amounts around the time a girl starts her period, goes a long way in explaining why girls get PMS.)

However, regardless of how common this problem may be, no matter how creatively I googled, all I found were message boards upon message boards of girls sharing the same experiences I’ve had. No useful WebMD information. No studies in scientific journals. Nothing professional or “internet reliable.” This is the most scholarly, well researched article I came up with. Almost 50 years of hormonal birth control and almost nothing has been done to treat this very common side effect.

This floors me. If my airway was blocked, surely that would be considered worthy of medical attention. So why is having my serotonin receptors blocked any different?

Moral of the story: avoid both bacteria and boys, thereby allowing you to sidestep all of the above medical dilemmas. Easy cheesy.