A hot water bottle and some aspirin

Queenie’s going to talk about periods today. Hold forth on the curse at length. Mention the menses, so to speak. Talk about interior design, as they say.

So if you’re squeamish, avert your browser.

Periods. Menstruation, menses, monthlies, on the rag, the little red fairies, the painters and decorators, the time of the month, Lady Moonbeam. The curse.

I hate the fact that it’s called the curse, but some months it surely is. The month you get it for Christmas. The month you get it when you're going on holidays. The month you get it the day of that huge presentation you have to make. The month you get it really bad. The month you miss yoga and it's like you never did a stomach crunch in your life before.

The month you get it the week you're going to Alberta.

Once, in desperate need to think positively about the whole thing, after yet another male doctor had listened to my sceal of woe, my need to control this aspect of my life in some way, shook his head patronisingly and told me I’d be grand once I’d had a baby/ gotten one of those injections that stops them altogether and no it doesn't destroy your libido that's all in your head/ stopped drinking coffee/ took 200 evening primroses capsules a day/ whatever the fad was, I bought a book on loving the female cycle.

It was called Red Moon, I think. It was all about enjoying the beautiful mystery that is the cycle of birth and death.

The book said women were a dark moon, or a white moon, depending on your cycle. I was whenever the flippin' thing arrived.

The book said women had four phases – the Virgin, the Lover, the Empress, the Hag. I went from Hag to Virgin to Hag to Virgin. At least I think that was what it was, I couldn't really understand the questionnaires.

I couldn’t summon the will to keep a Moon Log, or have a Menses Circle, or any of the soothing pseudo-Wiccan rituals Megan or whatever her name was suggested I do to take my mind off the pain. And I was thinking this afternoon on the way home, the woman who wrote that book probably never had the day Queenie had today.

In addition, the woman in the book probably has a really caring, slightly ripe but loving male Wiccan life partner who makes chamomile compresses for her and counts her moon blessings with her in the time of the Empress. Queenie’s experience of these things is that although the men in her life are usually up for a bit of TLC during ‘the time of the empress’, so long as it's not too discommoding, but they’re still a bit traumatised by the fortnight of the Hag they've just survived. So they're a bit circumspect. Not quite sure where the tire iron is located so to speak.

Honest to God, or Gaia, or Brig, or Imbolg, or whoever’s fault this is: Queenie has had enough of this shit to last her a lifetime.

When I was in secondary school, I nearly passed out with the pain on a regular basis and was staggering out of class one day to be brought home to bed when I heard one of the lads in her class say “She’s on the rag again, lads!” Effing hilarious you were that day, Billy Dooley. In fact, I’d have laughed myself stupid if I hadn’t been bent over double trying not to throw up or pass out.

If you ‘got caught’ without a tampon in school, (which I always was because I was very disorganised when I was a teenager due to having a growing brain. Apparently.) you had to go to Sr. Nora in the tuck shop and make the international gesture for ‘do you have a sanitary towel I could blag from you as I have no money for the machine in the ladies’ (arm across stomach feigning cramp, vague downward pointing motion with the other hand). She would then make the international gesture for ‘of course, pet’, which in her case was completely exaggerated (eyes crossed in sympathy, mouth silently forming the word curse?).

Then all the boys in the queue would snigger and point as she went to THE CUPBOARD and pulled out a monstrous nappy-shaped object, before beckoning you to the side door and shoving it up the tight sleeve of your school pullover. After that, you had to get yourself and your lumpen arm to the girls’ toilet and retrieve said monstrosity without ripping it to bits. Then you had to try not to walk like John Wayne for the rest of the afternoon till you got home to the box of LilLets.

No! Having an involuntary erection in geography class when you were fourteen does not count as ‘as bad’.

Not by a long shot.

At least nowadays, the poor unfortunate who experiences this would have a mobile phone to ring mammy and get her to come to the rescue. If she’s lucky enough to have a stay at home mum, I suppose. I was lucky. Once I figured out a way home, I always got put to bed with a hot water bottle and a couple of pills and enough compassion to ease the pain so I could just sleep it off.

University was a bit easier in that you could just nip off home when it got too bad. Of course, there was the odd month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before. Or horrors, the month when you’d drunk the tampon money the night before and then the flippin’ thing arrived while you were still ensconced in some flat that was not yours. Then you had to go scrounging fifty pences from people whose bedding/ couch you had just destroyed till you had the price of one of those blue and yellow boxes that they still put in a brown paper bag for you in some shops in Dublin.

What is it with the brown paper bag???? Am I some kind of shameful hussy for havin’ my bleedin’ period? Do they put Durex in a brown paper bag?

I don’t flippin’ think so.

But the workplace is the worst. When Queenie started work it was fine, but she’s noticed a change over the years. Because we’re all equal now, and the world has moved on and technology is great, so is that part of life not sorted yet? I think that's the vibe anyway.

I should point out that it’s not men’s fault. It’s my own fault. If you tell a bloke in work that you have your period nowadays, at worst you will get ‘carefully arranged compassion’ face and an offer of some ibuprofen. Which is what you get from the average female boss anyway. Usually, you get to decide whether you should go home, unless you're really busy, in which case you wouldn't even mention that you had 'a little bit of a cramp'.

Queenie has fond memories of the old days, when you could mention the ‘cramp’ word to a boss and expect ‘terrified rabbit in the headlights’ face and “Just go home, yeah, whatever”.

Which is of course bloke for Quick, quick, before I faint at the thought of it, ewww.

But with the increase in compassion and understanding, there seems to be less ability to just go home. There seems to be an ‘I understand your pain, no really I do. Remember I worked last week when I had that sinus cold thing. That was terrible.’ vibe around now. Which is a genuine attempt to understand the unknowable. And although it's well meaning, it really pisses Queenie off, because although she will never know for sure, she reckons that if men had the kind of sudden, piercing, cold-sweated, gut-twisting, dinner-churning, spots-before-the-eyes inducing, consciousness swimming in and out of lucidity, this one goes up to eleven, o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w-! pain she experienced for two hours today, they would be sent home in an ambulance.

But Queenie being used to Lady Moonbeam ‘testing’ her, tried to struggle on, reading mind-numbingly boring preparatory documentation for the Montreal Kyoto Meeting that she couldn’t see for the pain, until she realised it was madness and went downstairs to walk around a little. This was to stretch her pelvic muscles, which had started constricting like an anaconda on a buck rabbit, and to try to stop feeling dizzy.

There’s a little coven of women who sit outside the building at lunchtime. By the time I got downstairs, I was faint, so I hunkered down to stretch my lower back muscles and explained my predicament.

Women just get it. There was a sigh of understanding. An immediate consensus on the need for a hot water bottle. One of them said “it’s the lift, too, it affects you when you go up and down”.

It does?

“All that gravity rushing towards you, girl!” This woman talks like the really emotional teacher in Boston Public. She even looks a bit like her.

Marla or whatever her name is decided I needed aspirin. Aspirin is the only thing. Had I tried it? No, I hadn’t. It helps with the - you know - apparently. I didn’t know what the ‘you know’ was, but I would have tried heroin at that point.

Aspirin emerged from a bag. I was really hoping she had a hot water bottle as well, because at this point I just wanted to lie down on the street and go to sleep forever. No hot water bottle. It was decided that I would go to the drugstore and buy one and then go home. So I did. Well I tried to.

Could Queenie get a taxi? Could she ****, as the builder said to the judge.

So, another day wasted. Another day when I could have worked through the pile on my desk, or stared out the window, or gone to the movies, or whatever. Anything rather than lie here all afternoon and evening with a hot water bottle against my back and a stomach full of painkillers.

I have tried every pill, injection, diet, exercise regime and book known to man and the only thing that works is a hot water bottle and some ibuprofen. If I ever run a business or an office, I’m going to put a comfy armchair somewhere, with some painkillers and a range of hot water bottles tucked underneath it. And if any of my girls are having an off day, they can just go curl up on the couch with the hot water bottle and the newspaper until they’re well enough to move. Or the taxi arrives. Or their mammy.

Whatever they decide.