... question re period pants

[kaberett]

How do you tell when you've moved from spotting/very light flow to e.g. medium flow?

I have for the vast majority of my menstruating life (... and possibly getting on for two decades, good grief) used a menstrual cup. Alas, endometriosis specialists look particularly sad if you use them in the immediate aftermath of surgery. (I continue dubious about the retrograde menstruation hypothesis of causation, perhaps unfairly, and I especially continue dubious that menstrual cups in any meaningful sense increase the occurrence/quantity/severity of retrograde menstruation, but I am willing to concede that failure to release the vacuum seal when recently post-surgical is probably not a good idea.) Ergo, period pants.

And it's vaguely useful to know how heavily I'm bleeding (primarily for symptom tracking), so! Advice extremely welcome :)

Comments

no advice here, sorry

[redbird]

Not having heard of retrograde menstruation, I googled, and found sites saying that it happens to most people who menstruate. Which, in my admittedly amateur opinion, implies there it may be a factor in endometriosis, but it can't be the only thing going on there.

[gingicat]

I asked the person I know who wears them, and they said "you can tell by how long it takes to rinse them out."

[ninetydegrees]

As gingicat said but also paying attention to how much you're bleeding when you don't have your pants on (like in the shower or when you're peeing). Is this a Niagara falls or a brook situation? ^^

[azurelunatic]

On the toilet, "spotting" I tend to observe as either pink or rusty brown toilet paper color, and red for non-spotting.

[ewt]

Medium flow for me was far too much for period pants to successfully absorb. This is unhelpful though.

Having been forced to relinquish my menstrual cup by IC

[rydra_wong]

As with pads, you can feel when they start to get "full", e.g. feeling more moist against your skin etc., so you can tell when you need to change them . How frequently that happens obviously indicates how heavily you're bleeding.

Re: Having been forced to relinquish my menstrual cup by IC

[chiasmata]

This!

[ludy]

You get tell how quickly they fill up, from what the rinse water looks like and a bit by the pattern of absorbed blood compared to completely dry areas. And it’s very obvious what’s going on in the moment whenever you go to the loo and wipe (I only used a cup a handful of times and, as well as the dyspraxia issues, found it weird not to be getting that feedback unless I emptied/changed the cup).

I like period pants a lot (particularly for overnight if you are a restless sleeper). My only caution is if you have a lot of clots they obviously aren’t going to absorb them and they’ll stay on the surface necessitating more frequent changes and needing to deal with the ickyness of clots.

[cesy]

For me it's how quickly they fill up and how much I can see in/on them.

[kaberett]

I am having Some Difficulty with this metric because (1) I went for black and (2) I went for heavy because they were both discounted and Distinctly Relevant To My Potential Post-Surgical Experience, and this is definitely overkill for my actual current reality!