Written By Nyambura
What nobody warned me about was how little real, honest information is out there about the lived experience, the raw, unfiltered reality, of choosing and actually getting an IUD. All the research I did seemed to skirt around the details that really mattered to me: the physical sensations, the emotional rollercoaster, and the mental preparation that goes into making such a personal decision. I found myself craving stories not just about success rates, but about what it feels like to walk into that clinic, sit on that cold table, and make a choice that will affect your body and your life for years to come. When I decided to get one, I looked up resources online like Healthline, medical journals, and an article on Adventures, and I figured, yes, I want to have long-term contraception. The crash courses, I’d say, just talked about their efficiency, what they are, and how they work, da da da da; it seemed straightforward enough.
The decision to use contraception was prompted by a major pregnancy scare I experienced last year when my period was over a week late. At some point, on the day that the period was supposed to arrive, I felt some sort of contraction, like period cramps, in my lower abdomen, and I really thought those were the periods on the way. However, when I hurried to the bathroom, I found no blood. I figured it was okay, and maybe it was only one or two days late. But those days stretched into a week, and when I called my friend Sam, she told me to take a pregnancy test, and she assured me that if I was pregnant, she would absolutely be there for me, whichever decision I made. She also said that sometimes when implantation is going on, those pains can feel like period cramps, and there could be a chance that I was pregnant.
That idea of being pregnant was so scary. I thought about the probable father and how useless he might be considering what we have is so casual. As a matter of fact, if I were pregnant, I wouldn’t even tell him. I’d quietly walk into the next Marie Stopes while holding Sam’s hands. Anyway, I got the pregnancy tests, and when I went to pee, I was met with a dramatic stain of blood in my underwear, and I was so relieved. Blood sticking to my underwear, at that time, was the best thing I could say had ever happened to me. It was so joyful that I felt compelled to announce to everyone that I was on my period. Such a relief.
But that experience, the pregnancy scare, led to a bigger question that had been lingering at the back of my mind for a while: do I need to get contraception? However, there was also a much bigger discourse between my body, my mind and my heart. I don’t want to be pregnant just yet, my mind says. She wants to have a successful career, travel the world, meet people who will fuck her mind, and love her. My body says she wants to have lots of fun and lots of sex, to keep hiking, to eat lots of yummy food, to walk on the beach in a bikini, to get tattoos, and all those kinds of things. And my heart says it is still looking for love. A baby would be adorable, sure, but after listening to mind and body, we all agree that the best way to enjoy our late twenties baby-free is to get a contraceptive.
Using the resources I mentioned earlier, I embarked on a quest to find a contraceptive. Many options were off the table, especially anything that would interfere with my hormones, since even the small hormonal changes I experience during PMS affect me significantly. I become an emotional wreck; I am not a nice person during that time of the month, and I don’t like it. My friends don’t like me then, and it’s crazy. Also, ‘being on the pill’ was not going to be sustainable for me, because I am very forgetful, and at some point I will stop taking them. It takes some level of responsibility to take your pills consistently, one which I do not have. So I was left with the option of a copper IUD.
The next day, Thursday, from my corner office, I made some calls to the nearby Marie Stopes and scheduled an afternoon appointment. I left my notebook and computer tabs open to make my boss think I was nearby and had just gone out into the hot Nairobi afternoon. At the waiting lobby in Marie Stopes, I saw young girls clutching their partners’ hands, another girl reading from her novel, and me perusing through the magazines on the table picturing pregnant women and seeing their glowing faces, knowing very well I am not going to be pregnant soon.
I was called in to do a pregnancy test, which luckily was negative, and I remember the nurse asking me the last time I had had unprotected sex. It had been on Monday. She said I could be pregnant, so she had to do a blood test. She thereafter marched me to an operating room for the procedure. I have to say, no one prepared me for the pain that would come when the Doctor inserted the cold stuff inside my vagina. The discomfort was intense, accompanied by a sharp pain that pinched my insides. The intrusiveness of the IUD is something your body immediately tries to reject. As I lifted my legs up in the harness, I remember the clinical assistant asked me to think about my happy place, and I couldn’t think. So he asked me if I had been to Mombasa and if I liked the ocean. Yes, I told him. He asked me to imagine being there, and I tried visualising my happy place, hoping it would help me relax because, as it turned out, I was so stiff and rigid. But even with the distraction, I couldn’t help but involuntarily press my legs together when the cold clinical equipment—something I can’t name—went in, gripped me, and held it for a minute, pinching. I have to say the pain was excruciating and just brutal.
I had to stay still for a minute because I was feeling dizzy, as though I could faint. Everything around me was spinning, and I could hear my phone buzzing from a distance. The more it buzzed the more my vision cleared, and the ground stabilised. As the doctor and his assistant left the room, they gave me a maternity pad and warned me that I would bleed for a couple of days. From there, I regretted my decision, because I don’t like bleeding and cramps, but then I remembered how much it cost me and I had to swallow the pain. Now the hospital room looked cold, and it wasn’t ideal for me to ‘heal’, so I stood up on my trembling feet, dressed up and returned the call from my colleague who was asking me where I was so we could go home.
Getting home, I had to take so many painkillers to manage the pain in my lower abdomen. The bleeding had not even started, but when it came, it flooded constantly for about ten days. My first period after the IUD came with the worst PMS. I experienced striking migraines, cramps, and even a running stomach during my first period. The doctor said that it was my body rejecting the IUD, which is ‘normal’.
But a year down the line, it seems my body is still getting used to it. My periods are longer, and somehow my sexual drive is low. Maybe once a month, I get the urge, which turns out to be irresistible, and I can enjoy sex again. But no one told me how painful it is to have it inserted and your body constantly trying to reject it. But it feels secure to make choices that are good for your mental and sexual health. At the end of the day, that’s liberating.
