Male readers could have been warned by the title of this entry, but I will give yet another flashing red light for them:

THIS ENTRY IS ABOUT MENSTRUATION!

There. If you continue to read and get squicked out, it's your own damn fault.

So, there's this myth that says that if you breastfeed, you don't get your period. Let me just tell you that this myth ranks right up there with the myth about how breastfed babies don't get sick as often, and anyone who has read my journal for more than three weeks knows what I think about THAT myth.

Let's just say that "Aunt Flo" visited at 8 weeks post-partum, despite the fact that I had a parasite.. er.. baby permanently attached in remora-fashion to my nipple. I then proceeded to get extremely regular visits from said Auntie--far more regular than they ever were before pregnancy. 28 days, on the nose. Bah.

Except for this month. For some reason, she decided to pop in a few days early. At work.

To add to the unfortunate nature of this visit, I had somehow exhausted my purse supply of Necessary Supplies. Oh sure, I had a few Light Days, but we all know that on the first day of the visit, one of those will last about ten minutes. Not only was my purse empty of needed paraphernalia, but my desk, my computer bag, my breast pump bag, my car, my trunk, and all diaper bags were also distressingly empty of the desired absorbant material. I had blithely gone through all of my stashes in the past months, and had never bothered to refill any of them. (Again, all female readers will understand the "stash" mentality.)

Therefore, of course, the next course of action was to approach female coworkers. Now then, most women will understand that there is a certain sisterhood when it comes to this particular bodily function. When one is short on "supplies", a woman can usually ask any other woman for a donation, much like a nicotine addict can always find someone to bum a cigarette from. The drawback to working in a male-domainted environment is that there aren't many people to scrounge supplies from when the need is dire. I work with three other women. One was out sick. One was not due to come in until 4pm. That left the office manager. And as ill luck would have it, her stashes were empty as well. (We decided to attribute the complete dearth of sanitary materials to coincidence, rather than the strange and disturbing thought that someone had gone through all of our personal belongings and careful stolen anything that came in a pastel wrapper.)

It was at this point that I began to seriously consider the feasability of using a cut-down diaper. Fortunately I decided to have one more empty-the-purse-out search of my belongings. And LO, there in a deep inner pocket, was one delicate little plastic-wrapped cylinder. Thus was I was saved from having to wear Pampers.

***

This day: 1999