Has anyone had a period longer than 7 days? 🤔

[EmeraldGreenMusic]

Hello everyone,

Keen to know your thoughts on this as I await a GP appointment.

A quick backstory:

I’m 26 years old and have PCOS. From aged 15 to 20/21. I was on the pill to regulate a period since I’d never had one ever before. Since stopping I’ve had a period 16 times, so that’s 16 times since 2018. There were very irregular but recently my body has been playing games! I’m not quite used to it…

I’ve had a period every month since January 2023 which is not usual for me. I had two in April 2023, one at the start of April, and then at the end. I then had a period on the 16th May 2023 that lasted longer than 7 days. It’s only just started to die down and what was worrying is two/three days ago, I had a really uncomfortable cramp type of feeling over 7 days after starting my period. It’s basically the cramp you get when you first start but this was happening when I was suppose to end.

Obvs I know that irregular periods is part of PCOS but as I said this hasn’t ever happened where I’ve bled longer than 7 days and right now I just feel like I’m constantly on my period ….

Any thoughts?😆

[Ailsa72]

i had one for 21 days but I’m peri menopausal so I never know what or when to expect them

[parris960]

I feel your pain I’m the same I didn’t have one for 3 months and now I’m on and it’s my 3rd week of bleeding however it’s very very light.

I’m guessing it’s normal for us and it’s good your having a bleed I was told helping keep your womb lining healthy but it’s just so annoying and when TTC you don’t know whether you’re coming or going 🤦‍♀️

[Emelisa]

I finally had a helpful consultant explain it to me as I had similar where hardly any then more regular and couple of months ago I spotted for over 3 weeks. This may not be exact but was my understanding 😂 the ovulation process is that the body produces estragen to thicken the womb but it's not stable, when you ovulate it releases egg and body produces progesterone that stabilises the womb lining ready for fertilised egg to settle. If after 2 weeks or so there is no fertilised egg the body reacts by stopping progesterone which causes lining to shed and have a period. With pcos we might not ovulate each month, so if the oestragen has been thickening womb for a while but is unstable it can cause spotting or bleeding because it's thick and so sheds a bit of it but it's not a proper period. I was shocked as I'd had a full on bleed but when was scanned lining was still thick so it wasn't a period just the unstability.

I still don't quite get why for months had nothing and then some months have lot of spotting but they can't give any further info other than its the pcos which is unhelpful but above helped me understand why some bleeding isn't necessarily a period. And man that first proper period after all that spotting and fake bleed was brutal with cramps.

I've started taking my basal temperature every morning and I've spotted that if I'm getting a real period I see 2 weeks before a dip in the temp and then a slightly higher temp for a couple of weeks which represents the extra progesterone. So at least I can't tell when it's the random bleeding but if it's a period I get a 5 to 10 days warning, which worked up until 3 months ago when the random bleeding happened!