A woman in the US has shared her absolutely horrific experience with a period cup after spending months with it lodged in her uterus. Why did she have to endure months of having a malleable plastic cup stuck up her clacker to the point where she literally thought she was going to die? Because nobody believed it had happened. Sorry but this is possibly the most awful thing you’ll read in a hot while so strap yourselves in.
Utah-based writer and mother of three Nicole Cliffe posted a photo of the offending period cup on her Instagram in early August with an essay-length caption detailing everything that had happened for the last seven or so months.
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She wrote that she was already feeling awful late last year before realising something was not right while she was menstruating in January.
“I felt it while menstruating because of my cervix being low, soft [and] open,” Cliffe wrote.
“I could just stick a pinkie through my cervix and felt it and knew it could only be this.”
Cliffe spent a while trying to fish it out herself (no thanks) before her husband Steve talked her into going to the emergency room. She claimed the ER staff laughed at her and said it was impossible for a menstrual cup to find its way through a cervix and into a uterus.
After a nurse finally had a go at trying to find the cup in her vagina, Cliffe asked for an ultrasound which shows something but not enough to convince the hospital staff it was worthy of a 3D scan.
“There was something on the ultrasound but the imaging wasn’t great and they said it was a fibroid or cyst,” she said.
“I made a follow-up to see an ob/gyn. He looked at the ultrasounds and didn’t do a new one, nor did he perform a full pelvic.
“He laughed at me.”
I simply cannot comprehend the sheer malpractice at literally every turn, here.
Cliffe said that she started getting regular urinary tract infections (UTI) and was put on antibiotics which didn’t do anything to clear the source of the infection. She said she bled for nearly seven months because her uterus was constantly trying to get rid of the foreign object and soon became a very real emergency.
“I could have gone septic at any point,” Cliffe wrote.
“It ate my fat, my muscles [and] produced a constant fever which gave me my neurological issues, but it became an active emergency about two weeks before I got it out because it shifted and pinned my colon shut.”
No, no. No no no no no no thank you.
Cliffe said that at this point she knew that she was dying because as “a noisy person who loves sympathy” she instead found herself feeling like a sick cat and wanting to go hide and “die behind a couch or in a closet”.
She eventually had a moment where the cup shifted enough that it could be removed. Full disclosure, this bit is very full-on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
“Then, during sex, I felt a moment of mind-bending agony, screamed and was in a massive pool of blood,” she said.
“He had popped the suction. I ran to the bathroom, it was halfway out of my cervix. I could not live another moment like this and did my best to fold it and yank it out because I did not believe the ER would do it.
“It was the most painful moment of my life and then it was out.”
Let us take a quiet moment to reflect on literally everything that we’ve just read before deeply stress: absolutely fucking not. No thank you. As someone who uses period cups, I do not wish to perceive this.
At least those of us who menstruate can take comfort in knowing that getting a period cup right up there in your uterus is likely an extremely rare case. They’re definitely still a good environmentally-friendly alternative to tampons and pads so don’t let this ward you off.
If this whole ordeal Nicole Cliffe endured can teach us anything it’s that we should believe women when we say something’s wrong. Because Christ alive, I would not wish this on my mortal enemy.
