It's not oversharing if it keeps you from committing statutory rape.

A couple weeks ago, after putting it off for about 18 months longer than one is supposed to, I finally managed to get in for my yearly exam at the lady doctor. I always delay making this appointment, because… well, you don’t have to be a genius – or even a woman – to understand that it sucks to have a stranger rooting around in the darkest recesses of your vagina. With tools, no less. Tools! And that is why -- despite the fact that I knew my birth control was nearly gone – I still couldn’t get it together to schedule the stupid exam before my final pill pack clicked its way around to… empty.

Whoops.

See, the Pill and I have a long history; I’ve been on it since age 14. And I’m 27 now, which meant that, up until that moment when I ran out, I had officially been taking the pill for longer than I’d ever not taken it. I had made my way through high school, college, early adulthood and beyond without ever having experienced life sans oral contraceptives and their magical baby-battling properties.

Which, in my naïveté, somehow led me to think that there were no real differences between Life With Pill and Life Without Pill.

Even when my girlfriends talked about the side effects – weight gain, nausea, headaches, etc – I always privately thought they were just crazy and/or unlucky. And never did I think this more than when one of them revealed, after having just obtained her first prescription, that the pill had a serious depressive effect on her sex drive.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “I’m never, ever in the mood.”
“Oh God,” another friend chimed in, “That totally happens to me, too!”
There was a general chorus of agreement, while my jaw crept toward the floor, when suddenly someone said, “Kat, what about you?”
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Er, I’m on the pill, but that doesn’t happen to me.”
“Really?” said the first girl. “It doesn’t affect your libido at all?”
“Nope!” I said. And then added, “I mean, if it does, I’d hate to see what I was like without it! Ha, ha!”
“Ha! Ha!” said everyone.

Ha, ha.
HA.

Unfortunately, having now spent a month un-medicated, it turns out that the pill does affect my libido. I just didn’t realize it, because I have wanted to Do It All The Time for as long as I can remember, and it never occurred to me that my sex drive was being artificially depressed by hormonal contraceptives. I mean, on a libido scale of 1 to 10, I was already at an 8.5. How much higher could it get?

And then I found out: without the pill, on a libido scale of 1 to 10, I am WILT CHAMBERLAIN WITH A VAGINA.

I have since realized – shortly after a moment in which I found myself staring at an 18 year-old boy on the subway and thinking, “I’d hit that! I’d hit that right now! I’d hit it TWICE!” – that being constantly in the mood is a lot less fun than it sounds... unless you are Wilt Chamberlain, I suppose, or some other equally troubled person who thinks it would be great fun to spend several hours every day trying to surreptitiously rub yourself on the furniture.
Not that I have done that.
Yet.

Fortunately, having gotten my new prescription and officially resumed Life With Pill, I think I can expect to return to a more reasonable state of mind within the next few weeks. Which will be a great relief to everyone, including the furniture.

But in the meantime, there is a high school baseball team having a practice outside my office… and I have to go and try not to think about how much I want to bone the second baseman.

TWICE.