Becci’s story

PMDD stole 18 days each month of my life. Over 60% of my year was spent with my hormones and brain at war with each other, my body simply the battleground. For ten days of the month, I got to be me, but being me didn’t mean living free; it meant living under a cloud of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and fear.

I was picking up the pieces after each cycle, putting plans in place for the next cycle, and wondering what I could do to keep myself and my family safe.

For 18 years, the fight for help and answers continued.

I began my periods at age 14, and it was evident to my mum straight away that something was different. For two weeks each month, my mental health took a nosedive, unleashing some kind of entity on the world around me that was living deep within me. A day or two after my period began, I was freed from its clutches, back to being Becci once more.

Menstrual health education in school was sparse. PMS, the type where you get a little teary, stuff yourself with food, and feel a bit crampy, was a rite of passage to womanhood. No one talked about the type of PMS that leaves you walking the tightrope each month between life and death.

By 16, I had been dismissed by countless healthcare professionals; labelled a troubled teen from a broken home, depressed, anxious, told “It was just PMS,” and I couldn’t cope as well as my peers. Each month, the vicious cycle continued. The blinding rage, self-hatred, feeling lost to the world, knowing that all I could do was harm myself to feel something other than emptiness.

In 2008, I fell pregnant and glimpsed nine months of life free from cyclical torture. 9 months of normality within my reach, but cruelly snatched away within six weeks of my son’s birth. This time, doctors told me it was post-natal depression. Relationships broke down, family walked on eggshells, fearful of saying or doing the wrong thing in those two hell-like weeks that I looked like me but was not me.

By 2012, still battling with the cyclical demon, I was told I had a personality disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and bipolar disorder.

Heavily medicated, I still teetered on the edge of life and death in my premenstrual phase and became a walking zombie once my period arrived.

All it took was one GP in 2019, who asked such a simple question, to recognise the link between my hormones and my mental health. 18 years of fighting, misdiagnosis, and unsafe treatments. 18 years of not knowing whether I would survive from one month to the next. Now, I’m in chemical menopause, thriving and paving the way to ensure better for future generations.