On the Rag

Last week in my “Carmmageddon” post I mentioned I got my period. I wasn’t supposed to get it. Due to dangerously psycho PMS I’m on the kind of birth control pills that allow me to go the rest of my life without ever getting my period again. Unfortunately it might take up to a year for my body to catch on, and I’ve got eight more months to go!

Right now my body is really confused and I’ve been bleeding for over a week. I woke up in the middle of the night with what I was convinced were labor pains but they were just cramps, damn cramps, I wasn’t ever supposed to get the damn cramps! But hey, at least I wasn’t getting the cyst-like acne and the psycho flipouts, right?

Guess again! The cysts and the crazies showed up two days ago.
Granted, they’re nowhere near as bad as they used to be. I used to become eerily clairvoyant, paranoid, vicious, antisocial and reclusive before my period. Granted, I have my moments of greatest clarity when I have PMS, which can be a blessing in disguise in the long run. Nothing like the glaring light of Truth to generate a course correction, eh?

Unfortunately, when I have PMS I am so emotionally vulnerable that if my psychic insights turn out to be bad news I just can’t deal with them. Since Scorpio and I struggle frequently with issues related to fidelity and/or honesty, any time my PMS coincides with a recent betrayal or insult there are usually fireworks. His suggestion that I am loony and making things up is just another insult that only makes things worse. Scorpio can attest to my fits of white-hot rage that used to accompany the welts on my neck (WTF?) and my crying jags when I was at my worst; God/dess knows he received most of the kryptonite emails (not all of them: One of my work emails went as high up as the office of our Admiral at the Pentagon. I don’t want to talk about it, but least everything I wrote was true!). Worst of all, I wasn’t even aware of my mini-psychoses until I emerged from them and surveyed the damage with clear eyes. Scary.

Nowadays as my body grows accustomed to the birth control pills I only get low-levels of anxiety, depression and anger. Unfortunately they occur so randomly that I never know when the feelings will hit. I caught my reflection in the mirror while at yoga class on Tuesday and was shocked by how fierce I looked. It was a scary fierce that probably frightened half the people in the club! I’m not normally an angry person so this shocked me: How long had I been going around looking as though I were capable of biting the heads off small kittens?

I really need to do something about this, because never mind that anger isn’t cute, bad feelings are clearly connected to heart disease:

Depression. Symptoms of depression, as well as full-blown major depression, contribute to heart disease. People who become depressed after a heart attack or stroke, heart surgery, or the onset of heart failure don’t fare as well as those who aren’t depressed.

Anger/hostility. Atherosclerosis seems to advance faster in people who score high on anger or hostility scales. Anger can also trigger heart attacks. In the Harvard-based Determinants of Myocardial Infarction Onset Study, 1 in every 40 heart attack survivors reported an “episode of anger” in the two hours before the attack.

Anxiety. Intense anxiety, the kind associated with fear of enclosed places, heights, crowds, and the like, can sometimes set off a sudden cardiac arrest. These often-fatal heart attacks happen when the heartbeat abruptly turns fast and uncoordinated.

Social support. Among heart attack survivors, social isolation is almost as important as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and smoking at predicting long-term survival.

Chronic stress. Constant stress from work, financial problems, a troubled marriage, taking care of a parent or partner, or even living in an unsafe neighborhood has been linked with the development of heart disease and doing poorer with it.

Sudden emotional stress. Sudden emotional turmoil can set off a type of serious but reversible heart failure dubbed broken heart syndrome. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have documented its appearance in people after a death in the family, a surprise party, a robbery, a car accident, and even fear of speaking in public.

I suppose yoga class was the best place for me to be that night. Unfortunately it wasn’t a “real” yoga class; anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of yoga could tell this woman was just an aerobics instructor leading people in stretches. I couldn’t stand this instructor, either: Not because she was a hyper size zero Ann Coulter lookalike, but because she had a super loud, super screechy chipmunk voice that gave me a headache! Can I kill her please? Oops, bad PMS!

Fortunately, on Saturdays the health club has an Indian woman teaching real yoga. This woman appears to be in her mid-50’s or early 60’s and she’s in better shape than I am! She really knows her stuff: She uses the Indian terminology and plays Indian music, and spends a great deal of time on the mental and spiritual aspects of the practice. Also, I have my yoga tapes at home and have done my research to find out which positions are best for managing anger. By assuming those positions that open the heart chakra, the emotions become un-stuck and flow better.

I figure, with regular yoga practice I’ll be able to survive the next eight months without hurting anyone or causing any property damage. Perhaps during my “good” weeks I’ll even be able to capture some bliss! In the mean time . . . I’ll just do my best.