“This article appeared on Full Stop in March, 2016. I began writing it in my journal in a hospital waiting room in November, 2015. I was waiting to get my IUD out. Before it was even done (before the gynecologist would pull it out of me and tell me I’d wasted it, the precious device!) I already knew: what was happening to me was phenomenal.
Six days post-insertion, I was sitting in that waiting room fuming with copper and wanting to kill myself, maybe others, too. I was hurting, mentally and physically, in ways I’d never before. I was exhausted and in pain. I’d never felt closer, in a way, to my mother, who has multiple sclerosis. Something had opened and I had no idea what was going to happen to me.
What I learned post-waiting room — in the months after when I was presumably recovering from this insane copper poisoning—is that if this was a phenomenon it was also frightfully common, everywhere. Thousands of women all over the world report the devastating turn their life took post-IUD insertion, whether it was in for 3 days or tens of years. Women report, in such a spectrum of ways, that after using this popular and feminist device their health unraveled—in some instances (like me) immediately, and for some more slowly.”
“This article has needed an update. I published it in the middle of my recovery from this copper toxicity, at a time when I had a lot of new joint pain. I hoped that as I detoxed the copper, I would heal. That’s what the end of this article is all about, getting the IUD removed and moving on. But I couldn’t bend half my fingers. I could hardly walk. At the time, I still hoped for this detox, but what really happened is that my joint pain got very bad. My bones started bending, fingers looking like pieces of hoops, body horror. In May 2016, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis.
In August of 2017 I started writing Blackfishing the IUD, which — as its published this October — will be the first book to explicitly discuss the negative health effects of this device. I needed a space to say what had happened — to tell and to warn. Not everyone gets autoimmunity but for someone like me, with that genetic susceptibility, this toxic event in my uterus triggered my first RA flare. Autoimmunity isn’t everyone’s story, but others experience anxiety, depression, heart palpitations, hair loss, and joint pain. Through writing Blackfishing I’ve connected with many people who are as charged as I am about this topic, because their lives are irrevocably altered, too. Some of their writing is in the book, as well as a burgeoning set of research that links the IUD with the onset of autoimmunity, and particularly the disease I now have.”