After years of struggling to articulate the difference between the two conditions, she finally finds an explanatory image, “a photograph with a split screen: one side reads PMS with a photo of a woman pulling her hair out, and the other side reads PMDD with a woman on the edge of a rooftop.” Online, she discovers a vast community of women with PMDD, who live like she does, in perpetual fear of what they call their “werewolf week.” As many as eight percent of those who menstruate experience PMDD, yet its symptoms-bouts of extreme irritability, depression, or anxiety in the week leading up to your period-are often characterized as run-of-the-mill mood swings that accompany PMS. Her thirties brought with them more painful periods, as well as the onset of PMDD, the more severe form of PMS. The prayers to a period god that she “wasn’t sure existed to make it stop, to please make it stop.” The darkness, the dread, the helplessness.Īs she reflects on her past, Caldwell also investigates her still-changing body. The night her cramps were so bad that she, delirious, gave each one a name as it passed through her. Taking photos of her blood in the toilet, diffused across the water in the shape of a lotus flower.
Asking friends, as a teen, to “check my butt” for blood stains. The clotting, the shitting, the crying on the bathroom floor and meltdowns in public places. I thought it was normal ’cause no one talked about it.” “I would cry in bed holding my stomach, trying not to let anyone know, even your dad. Her interview subjects often say “I wish I’d known” and “If only someone had told me.” “My periods had such pain I didn’t tell anyone about,” her own mother tells her.
#Tincture a weird west trilogy series#
In a series of interviews with loved ones and strangers, she creates a compendium of menstrual experiences. Early in the book, she learns she is nowhere near alone. From debilitating cramps to premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), Caldwell’s existence is governed-often tyrannically-by her cycle. The Red Zone is Caldwell’s attempt to grapple with her disruptive menstrual symptoms and find community through them. Not really, they said.” Four years later, her friends still remember the trip: “Something was really wrong,” one says. I asked them if they got this sick on their periods. “Back at the picnic table, I burst into tears telling my friends how sick I was,” she recalls. She is 31 and on a beach trip when she gets her period and is beset by severe cramps and diarrhea (both of which, I learned as a 12-year-old, are caused by the hormone prostaglandin’s indiscriminate approach to muscle contraction).
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound super normal,” another said.Įarly in The Red Zone: A Love Story, author Chloe Caldwell has a similar experience. Finally one spoke: “I don’t think I’ve ever had that.” The rest shook their heads. We griped, we commiserated: Swimming with a tampon in? So annoying! Getting your pubes stuck to a pad’s adhesive? The absolute worst! And what really ground my gears, I said, joining the chorus, was the immobilizing pain, shooting down your legs, radiating up your back, ripping through your abdomen, and then you become a receptacle for all that pain, and no thoughts could form because everything was pain. I was 15, sitting with friends in the schoolyard, having lunch and trading stories-as teenage girls do-about our periods.
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