Lea is 32 years old, married with two daughters whom she gave birth to at home. One girl is at primary school, the other still crawls into Mummy’s bed at night.
Lea is a freelance advertising expert and works from her home office. This is a practical set-up, as it means she usually always has free access to a toilet. It’s an unbeatable advantage for having a stress-free product-free period, which Lea has done for several years.
As Lea doesn’t just want to design and write the advertising campaign for the first manned Mars mission, she has also allowed us to follow along with her free bleeding in this COMIC DIARY which she wrote especially for us.
Before we start, let’s quickly summarise what it’s all about.
When a girl reaches a certain age, she becomes a woman who can become pregnant. The special thing about this is that your uterus bleeds now and then, and this blood flows out of the vagina.
Different hormones ensure that bleeding occurs regularly. This is why it’s also called “monthlies” or your “period”. It can also be called “menstruation” because the bleeding occurs approximately every 28 days, which is about once a month (from the Latin “mens”).
Your body wants to ensure you have the chance to reproduce every month.
The egg, from which a baby could develop, ‘jumps’ from one of your two ovaries into one of the fallopian tubes found to the left and right of the womb during ovulation (“ovulation” from Latin, ovus = egg). Some women feel their ovulation during this time directly to the left or right below the navel.
You are fertile and can become pregnant, even several days before ovulation occurs. You can detect this fertile period by checking your vaginal discharge which becomes stretchier until it feels like egg white.
If an egg is not fertilised during sex by the man’s ejaculate which contains sperm, then it does not need to be anchored to the moist mucus membrane of the womb.