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Not just for me, it would have been helpful to actually learn more about sex itself because we really didn’t very much. They didn’t cover anything in the slightest about birth control or like, any of that. And it was not realistic to not address that in a high school setting. And it also, I didn’t find out until later, and I would have appreciated the information that birth control concerns are totally different for people with major mobility issues because we are in the category of being a major blood clot risk.

So, all the estrogen-based options are off the table for most of us. And I didn’t know that until I was an adult looking for ways to manage my period. It was like, oh, yeah, okay, well, that takes a lot of choices off the table. And yeah, nobody really mentions that, even doctors. It’s kind of like an afterthought.

And what makes it even more difficult, too, is you’re not even sure that the options that are on the table are going to agree with you. For example, I tried a progesterone based IUD, and I had an awful experience with it. I felt sick the entire time it was in. So just because you can use something doesn’t mean it’s going to work. So it’s unfortunate that we have such a small number of options to start with, and then you have to sort through, like, okay, which ones are actually going to agree with my system as it stands.