Laura Lewis-Waters

Provera (5mg)

a one tablet a day for 10 days a month
kind of treatment from day 16 of the cycle
but I don’t have a cycle, I think, I need you
to give me one, hand it over, berate my uterus,
shed that lining, make me work.

Provera has several uses:
heavy periods painful periods irregular
periods frequent periods any type of
period?
Absent periods

I don’t care about
calf tenderness nervousness dizziness
breast tenderness tiredness drowsiness
hair loss hair growth weight increase
weight decrease

blood clot: brain
blood clot: lungs

life-threatening anaphylactic reaction

that is until I’m sat on the kitchen floor,
wishing for darkness with three hormonal
treatments running rampant inside me,
I just want to bleed.

And don’t even get me started on the Clomid.

Image ID: A graph entitiled Healing After Birth Injury. Points are plotted on the graph from left to right and labelled ‘pain medication wears off’, ‘I need to look after a baby’, ‘I made it to the toilet’, ‘weak, so weak—will I ever be healthy again?’, ‘cryhing less each day’, ‘Coping. Just about coping.’, ‘I can pick up my baby’, ‘shopping trolleys still hurt’, ‘going back to work hurts’, ‘Time is the best medicine. Really.’, and ‘Never believed I would be here’. The points are connected by a blue line that makes a ragged climb from bottom left to top right of the graph.

Content note: social media

Just in case
it helps anyone today –

it looks like
we’ve had a good day

and we have.

But, at bedtime
(during the day too)

I notice how much
pain I am in

and I am.

Because it’s not
all smiles

it’s prolapse symptoms
coccyx pain

it’s mental pain.

It’s desperation
to feel healthy again.

If anyone else is
going through this

you are not alone.

Laura Lewis-Waters (she/her) is a poet, mum, teacher and research student from the Midlands. Her debut collection Bathroom Prisoners was published recently by Bent Key Publishing and is a vulnerable account of her experience with OCD while pregnant. She also writes about climate change and mental health and motherhood and her poems have recently been featured at the BBC Upload Festival as well as in Public Sector Poetry Journal, Free Verse Revolution Lit Magazine and Streetcake Magazine.