Sixteen Years of Blood and Silence

Trigger Warning: graphic descriptions of menstrual and medical experiences.

I still remember the Virginia Beach trip. It was supposed to be a working vacation; a month at the beach, relaxation with friends, and building a podcast network from the ground up. Instead, I got to add days trapped inside, shuffling from the bed to the bathroom every fifteen minutes. At one point I stood in the shower for an hour, just watching as red fluid and tissue slid down my legs, only slightly slower than the water running over my body. I wondered if this was what Carrie felt like in the Stephen King novel. I wondered if I would die.

I called the nurse line, desperate. She begged me to go to an emergency room. But I was out of state, supposed to be on vacation. And I knew what would happen there: I’d be prodded, scanned, sent home with nothing but another medical bill and the same bleeding body I walked in with. So I stayed, pacing the floor, hanging up the phone with the thought that maybe my life might just end in that rental bathroom.

That wasn’t the last time. A decade and a half later, I did end up hospitalized. The doctors told me what I now know has been true since childhood: I’ve been chronically anemic, running on fumes for decades. Add asthma to that mix and it’s not just inconvenient - it’s dangerous. Still, the world doesn’t pause for bodies like mine. I’m on day three of what might last two weeks, and I’ve already passed out from exhaustion three times. Yesterday I had groceries delivered: high-iron supplements, lactation cookies, chili with beans and extra protein. I’m fighting with everything I’ve got just to stay upright.

And here’s the part that makes me furious: it isn’t just that I’m expected to show up. I’m expected to show up early, like always. To push harder, move faster, prove myself tougher than the men beside me. That’s the unwritten bargain of being a woman at work: bleed quietly, outperform loudly. Most days I do it low on snacks and half-fueled, because my body doesn’t play fair. I’ve spent a lifetime managing this cycle, every twenty-one days or so.

When I actually sat down and did the math, it kind of frazzled me for a hot second. I’ve had my period since I was ten years old. I’m forty-six now. Even if I subtract the pregnancies and recoveries, that’s thirty-four years of actively being attacked by my body. Because my body runs on a short twenty-one-day clock, I’ve racked up nearly six hundred cycles so far.

Now let's add PCOS; my bleed isn’t the neat three-to-five days you read about in health class - I'm closer to twelve days, though three weeks has absolutely happened. Add that up and it comes to almost six thousand days. Six thousand days of bleeding, fainting, dragging myself to work, collapsing in bathrooms, rationing snacks, watching the world spin while I try to stay upright.

That’s sixteen years of my life. Sixteen fucking years. Out of forty-six, gone to pain and exhaustion. Sixteen years of feeling like death - all because I have the power, the ability, the expectation to grow a life.

And yet through all of that, I’m still expected to keep pace in a culture built around the 40-hour week. A culture that treats pain as weakness and women’s health as an afterthought. The American workplace doesn’t want to hear about PCOS, anemia, or cycles that drag on for two weeks at a time. Unless you’ve got paperwork signed, dated, notarized, and updated quarterly, you’re written off as unreliable. Which is funny, considering women like me have been bleeding through our jeans, our work uniforms, our lives - and still outperforming the men - for decades.

We’ve been told to swallow iron pills, pop ibuprofen, grit our teeth, and keep going. But no one ever asks what that costs us. Sixteen years. Six thousand days. And I’m still counting.

I’ve learned survival hacks, sure. But we shouldn’t need hacks to stay alive. Those come next.