NAPS provides reassurance when a solution is hard to find.
Civil Engineer Mary finds help
Civil Engineer Mary finds help
Mary's Story
My name is Mary. I'm 28 and a Civil Engineer and I live in Birmingham.
As one of a minority of female engineers in what is a very male dominated industry there's no way I could ever admit to a ‘girlie' problem.
As an engineer I like to know what's going on and how to solve it. Any problem has a solution if you look at it for long enough. My work means that I have a lot of experience of trying to work round things you'd rather weren't there (electricity cables, badgers, motorways) but I'm yet to find a way of entirely working around PMS and so far it's not responded well to logic.
I don't know when my story starts as lots of different people tell me that I showed signs of depressive tendencies well before I started to notice them. I'm told that arguing about whether to use a washing up brush or a sponge isn't entirely normal (although maybe it is for the people likely to read this account!)
It came to a head while I was studying at university in Birmingham and I ended up on anti-depressants. With a few lifestyle changes (more relaxing, less stressing over coursework, quite a lot more chocolate) I recovered quickly. However I was left with a side effect that I hadn't expected - PMS. It may have been there before, but I now knew what depression felt like and recognized its shadow. Feeling fully depressed once a month was scary as each month I thought it was the depression back again, only to suddenly discover that it was over and ‘just' PMS.
After university I moved ‘home' to Reading where my mum was glad to be able to keep a closer eye on me. She could see the problem and supported me whilst knowing that she couldn't solve the problem. The support was invaluable as I started work and couldn't just hibernate when I was having a bad day. Mum accepted that there was a problem and that acceptance helped me to deal with it all practically.
At this point I started to manage it. I planned my work so that I did all my filing on bad days and didn't need to do anything technical or analytical until by brain was likely to be working. I generally tried to plan my diary so that Iwasn't trying to make technical decisions or have client meetings on ‘bad days'. In theory this was fine but my cycle was so irregular that I couldn't really plan it that well. So I went to the doctor who suggested that I could go onto anti-depressants, the pill and/or agnus castus.
That was when I found NAPS - I googled agnus castus in an attempt to work out what on earth it was as it wasn't something that I could get on prescription. Discovering NAPS was reassuring straight away - there were other people like me. I wasn't completely mad even if there didn't seem to be a nice neat solution to the problem. However it lead to lots more questions about agnus castus- no one seemed to be able to tell me what dosage I should take and what I could reasonably expect from it. So I tried it for a while but it didn't make any noticeable difference for me.
Each month expecting a horrible PMS period meant that I began to dread it to such an extent that a more ‘normal' depression reared its head again. It's hard to be positive about the world when you know you're going to have a few days of hell at some point within the next month.
I went onto the pill to control when it all happened, and a little later back onto anti-depressants every day. It seemed to do the job although I hate having my life controlled by pills. But then, if it's not, then my life would instead be controlled by the PMS. I can't win.
I am lucky, I think, to have a family that supports me and recognises that there is a problem that needs addressing. My boyfriend has learnt the hard way how to cope when I'm having a bad time and if anything it's strengthened our relationship as we're honest about what's going on. For example he now knows it's best to hang around when I'm really bad, as otherwise I'll assume he hates me!
At the moment I'm still taking anti-depressants and having some counselling to try and sort out the interim stuff. The hope is that coping better with the rest of the world in between periods should help minimise the impact of PMS. I hope that I can stop the anti-depressants one day too but at the moment it's just not worth the risk, until I'm ready to try. And my boyfriend, whilst supportive, is running out of ways to cope with arguments about washing up brushes. But that does mean that he does the washing up these days.
