I LOVE the Shot!
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| Thu, 12-28-2006 - 11:25am |
Like a lot of young women, I am not ready for children, nor do I want to have any until I am married; but I still want to have fun with my BF. For the past 4 years, I've been on the Shot (aka Depo Provera). This has been my birth control method of choice. This is a GREAT option for women who do not want the hasstle of a daily birth control pill, no periods after the first 6 months, and are at risk for blood clots. This method is 99.99% effective; which translates into 1 in 1000 women getting pregnant. The shot is administered by a nurse once every 3 months. And as long as you have health insurance, the cost is only the co-pay. Without, it costs about $170 per shot.
Aside from having your tubes tied or absitnence, this method has the highest effectiveness rate!

Hi dyavil, welcome!
Jill
I am one that Jill is talking about who is having debilitating side effects from depo. I only had one shot and I gained 15 pounds in a month, have the acne of a 13 year old, not to mention the mood swings, anxiety, panic attacks and depression. I'm convinced that depo is so successful because it either takes away your sex drive completely (yep, I have that too) or makes you feel so fat, pimpled and entirely undesireable that you don't want to have sex at all anyway. Also, after no period at all for 3 months, I've been bleeding solid for a month now, which is not so much conducive to a sex life, if I wanted one anyway.
What upsets me most is that my doc didn't tell me about all the possible psychological effects of the shot. I realize they can't predict how BC will effect specific women, but all I was told was that there was a possibility of a slight weight gain, no more than 2 or 3 pounds. I feel like either the drug reps are lying or my doctors are, and I'm still paying some serious consequences. I highly recommend that each of you considering depo DO YOUR RESEARCH in advance, and don't just blindly believe what the docs tell you, because they may just be repeating what the drug reps tell them.
Hi there.
You sound just like my doctor did, when she pushed depo onto me after the minipill caused me problems:
"This is a GREAT option for women who do not want the hassle of a daily birth control pill, no periods after the first 6 months, and are at risk for blood clots."
The first shot was great.
Hi
Jill
I know this thread is a little old but had to add my two cents in. The Depo shot gave me horrible depression. I was fine, one year post partum and looking for something to switch to from the minipill, and chose the depo shot. Within a few weeks, I was terribly depressed (including intrusive self-destructive thoughts like thinking about driving my car into a telephone pole while I was driving), and this came and went for almost two years until I finally started taking Wellbutrin. After only 6 mos of Wellbutrin I was feeling so much better and weaned off and was OK. Now that I am 5 mos pg I have been having increasingly bad mood swings with many of the same issues I had in the depression I had in the time between the shot and the meds for the depression. I can only surmise my hormones are the issue this time which only helps to further convince me the hormonal imbalance brought on by the shot is what caused my depression the first time around.
I will never again use systemic hormonal birth control and it would take a lot of convincing for me to use any sort of hormone therapy during menopause because of this problem.
I know not everyone who uses depo has such issues but I wish I had chosen an alternate method. Gosh, even the patch would have been better. I was too much of a weenie to get an IUD at the time - wish I had. I lost almost 2 years of my life and was a terrible mom when I was depressed.
New and improved siggy coming soon (which could mean after Christmas)