Let’s Talk About Tampons

Coworker: I just saw a patient complaining of discharge, it was a retained tampon! How do you put a tampon in and forget it?

Me: “raises hand sheepishly” well…

I’ve definitely removed a tampon and had two come out. TMI?  Well let me try harder, keep reading. It’s so easy to lose track of tampons. You may be thinking, “you take one out, then you put a new one in.” I wish it was that simple.

When your periods are so heavy and you’re doing too much. You’ve bled through everything so you gotta take off your old pad, wrap it in a toilet paper burrito, reach into you bag and get a new pad. Now it’s time for the tampon, but your still bleeding, so you gotta wipe away blood so you don’t get your hands all messy. Remove old tampon. Reach into bag, get new tampon, put it in.  30mins later, just tampon change. Old tampon new tampon. 60 mins later, pad pad tampon tampon. Then tampon tampon. Maybe just pad pad. Pad pad tampon tampon, pad tampon tampon pad pad tampon pad pad pad tampon? Pads and tampons everywhere, it all blends together.

Or perhaps you’re just rejoicing the end of your monthly bleed and celebrated too early, forgetting to remove that last one.

In any event, you start having discharge and smell something off, you might even be having some pelvic pain. You head to your friendly gynecologist who finds the culprit. Relieved and a little grossed out, you vow never to have that happen again. While you may question your math abilities and feel silly or embarrassed, don’t be hard on yourself. It happens more often than you may believe. Take that from someone who’s removed many a retained tampon, including one trouble maker that was in for 3 months. 

Even if you’ve never forgotten a tampon inside, your girlfriend have told you stories. You also remember that time you took out 2 at the same time and still can’t figure out how you managed that.  So now you forget if you just took one out now before the wave of insane cramping pain hit you or if that was 15mins ago when you changed your last tampon and pad at the same time.  

Or maybe you’re a lady who has to double up on tampons ‘cause the flow is so heavy.

Or you have somewhere you need to be and you did a super quick change but now looking back you wonder if you took the last one out. 

You don’t see a string dangling.

How many tampons did you put in your bag this morning?  

Periods are confusing. 

In any event, now you’re sitting on a toilet in a public restroom feeling around for a string and getting your hand all bloody and gross to confirm that there isn’t already a tampon in there.  And now you hate everything.

Infertile Obgyn