An Oxy girl in an Oxy world

When people told me that the whole Glenn experience would change me, I didn't think they meant it would change me physically. But it did. In some weird, lovely and not so lovely ways. On the plus side, I lost 20 pounds and managed not to gain it all back. On the down side, my body chemistry shifted back about fifteen years, which took me a while to recognize as a direct consequence of the fact that I went off the Pill last July. So I was completely mystified when my deodorant stopped working and my skin broke out as if I'd stepped into a belated adolescence.

Hormones are funny, funny things and when you haven't had to think about them for a while, they can play nasty games on you. I went on the Pill eleven years ago, during my freshman year of college, and never went off it. I started because, for reasons known only to my uterus and ovaries, I began getting my period twice a month. Two periods a month is bad for your underwear, your sex life and your mental sanity (as well as your hematocrit), especially during college when very few people are concentrating on taking good care of their bodies. Eleven years is a long time, and I totally forgot about the way ingesting hormones of any kind will play with your system. When I went off the Pill last summer, I went off because I couldn't get my act together about transferring my prescription from LA to Boston. Also, I was suddenly having no sex whatsoever and going to all that trouble only so I could be reminded of my now-dormant sex life every night before bed didn't make much sense.

Two things happened almost immediately. I dropped another five pounds that I didn't know I had to lose, and my moods suddenly became as even as a balance beam. All of a sudden the grief stopped being so debilitating. Bonus!

A few months passed and suddenly I started getting these nasty little zits along my hair line. My deodorant stopped working and I realized it was because the PH of my body had changed. Then the zits spread to my chest and along the back of my shoulders. After another month, I began breaking out like a teenager. My face looked like a pizza, at least to me. I never had skin problems even when I WAS 15, so this was extra disturbing. When it became clear that the acne wasn't just going to vanish on its own, I broke down and made a trip to CVS.

Buying Oxy when you're 29 is embarassing. I felt like a failure as a female, like I wasn't reading enough magazines or taking good enough care of my skin. Thankfully, the stuff did the trick. I should note that I went back on the Pill right after Christmas, so that probably helped. But what the Oxy people neglected to tell me (or what I didn't read on the box) is that Oxy isn't nice to fabric. It bleached my nice new towels, my new flannel sheets and the back of my new Victoria's Secret pajama top that I bought to wear for B on my last trip to SF. I suppose it's a small price to pay for normal, healthy adult skin. Lesson learned.