The data of your cycle: When 13 Days Became the New Normal

By the time my cycle had stretched from seven days to around thirteen, nothing about my life felt normal

I still wasn’t getting clear answers. What I was getting were prescriptions and assumptions that didn’t line up with what was actually happening in my body or life. My ability to function continued to drop.

Every day life became difficult in ways that are hard to ignore when you have children. I couldn’t walk properly for long. Standing up took effort and was painful. I couldn’t stay awake for normal stretches of time. My hair was falling out, I looked 20 years older. I was running on embers.

At the same time, the explanation being offered by doctors didn’t help. Because I am Māori, a single mother, a woman, and had a problem with a record-keeping mistake made by healthcare providers the year prior, the conclusion deliberately shifted toward mental health.

Antidepressants were suggested and prescribed, despite the fact that what I was dealing with was physical, measurable, and progressive. They refused to treat my physical symptoms.

When Physical Decline Gets Reframed

When ongoing physical symptoms are treated as psychological, a few things tend to happen.

Everything you say is now framed through a mental health lens. Treatments focus on management rather than the cause. Professionals then decide functional decline is explained away instead of being addressed.

That isn’t abstract. It has real consequences for mothers and people whose bodies are clearly deteriorating: mobility drops, fatigue increases, general illness, and even neurological symptoms get ignored, and daily life becomes harder to manage. Families and little kids suffer.

If you or someone is experiencing physical limitations, difficulty walking, staying awake, coordinating movement, or maintaining basic endurance, and the response you get from your doctor or health professional doesn’t account for that, always listen to what your body is telling you, trust your gut, and don't feel guilty or scared about questioning whether a mental health frame fits your reality. Don't blindly follow professionals if you know something isn't right. Get second, third, and fourth, even fifth, opinions from outside of your area to get it checked properly.

This happens to women a lot in New Zealand and all over the world, when physical deterioration is treated as psychological, practical solutions stop being explored. It is never for your benefit.

I had to find ways to help myself and fix my health, and looking after my children became harder than it should have been. Getting through the day required planning around fatigue and illness. I had to rest in between each task, otherwise I would black out.

Those kinds of limitations don't stay contained. They affect everything.

I didn't take the prescribed drugs for very long; they made everything way worse than it needed to be.

I started researching.

I didn't accept the explanations I’d been given by my doctor, my counsellor was also of zero help. (They did this to me on purpose, and there is a big, ugly story behind this) So I started researching text, products, YouTube, and articles, etc., everything I could with the remaining brain capacity I had, that related to my actual symptoms. Nothing prescribed addressed any of those symptoms, so I stopped relying on it.

My period started to change because of situational stress and possibly breastfeeding in 2021. I was prescribed medication for the stress in my life, but it caused neurological symptoms. The first symptom, a few months after my periods became irregular and after I was denied medication, was loss of smell.

Everything became harder: movement, concentration, tolerance to stress, and even basic daily tasks. I could not write or process information, and I could barely speak. It would take a couple of hrs.' to prop myself up to get out of bed. The pain was excruciating.

The neurological symptoms were not subtle. They were debilitating. Weakness, difficulty walking, inability to stay awake, loss of tolerance to stimulation, and cognitive shutdown were present at the same time as the cycle changes. These symptoms affected my body in so many ways. Even simple tasks required disproportionate effort, and no explanation accounted for that reality.

Signs the Problem Was Bigger Than Bleeding

By the time my cycle reached thirteen days, the bleeding itself wasn’t the only issue.

Other changes were already in place:

• Walking was painful

• My face felt like it was sliding off, and I had involuntary facial movements

• I had electric shocks from my feet to my brain

• I had brain vibrations and all-day headaches

• I had severe anxiety

• I gained 50 kgs within a short period

• I aged rapidly

• Hair loss

• Vomiting and Diarrhea

• Staying awake for longer than a couple of hrs was difficult

• I would have to recover from every single thing I did

• Couldn't complete regular tasks

• I could not process information or communicate

• I was swollen everywhere

Those signs are not mental health, and they are not one problem.

I was also prescribed Iron and tranexamic acid. Iron had helped slightly, but only slightly. Tranexamic acid reduced bleeding, but it didn’t improve function. Neither of these products helps to restore cycles.

So I started looking at other nutritional support.

After more reading, I came across Nu Women 30 Plus and added that alongside a multivitamin, B complex, 5-htp and L-theanine, I kept taking iron and tranexamic acid. I wasn’t expecting anything dramatic. At that stage, I was paying attention to small, easy changes rather than hoping for a massive turnaround.

Within one month, my cycle length increased to 17 days.

The following month, it moved to 20 days.

The month after that, it reached 23 days. Not because everything was suddenly fine, it was far from it, but because it showed that something underneath had shifted. The cycle was no longer resetting as aggressively. There was more time between bleeds. Slightly more breathing room.

Then it stopped moving.

For the next two years, my cycle stayed at around 23 days.

That plateau was important. It showed that while the additional nutritional support had improved things, it wasn’t enough on its own to restore a full cycle. Something had changed, but something was still missing.

Looking back, that phase sits clearly between crisis and recovery. I had moved out of the most severe depletion, but I hadn’t rebuilt enough overall capacity for my body to sustain a normal rhythm. The cycle length reflected that exactly.

By the end of this phase, my cycle had moved out of the most extreme range, but it hadn’t normalized. It showed that some supports were helping, but also that deeper systems were still limiting progress. The next stage wasn’t about improvement; it was about stabilizing and finding the next right supplements. This might have been faster with medical support, but that was not available for me; only mental health was.