blooooood

[schneefink]

The first question is pure curiosity, the second question is to make me feel less stupid, the third is purely practical.

Poll #21733 Shark week

This poll is closed.
This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 49

Pick what applies:

View Answers

I don't have a uterus.
0 (0.0%)

I menstruate regularly.
39 (79.6%)

I menstruate irregularly.
4 (8.2%)

I don't menstruate for medical reasons, pregnancy etc.
1 (2.0%)

I don't menstruate because I'm post-menopausal.
4 (8.2%)

I don't menstruate yet.
0 (0.0%)

Other (please explain in comments)
1 (2.0%)

People who menstruate regularly, how often do you wake up to find bloody bedsheets:

View Answers

Never
13 (28.3%)

Rarely
21 (45.7%)

Sometimes
9 (19.6%)

Often
3 (6.5%)

Favorite method to get the blood out:

View Answers

Comments

[out_there]

Also, as a weird aside, I will say that the bloody sheets issue was a lot better after I started using overnight/maternity pads for the first night (which is my heaviest flow). Wearing the longer pads made a difference to stains.

[momijizukamori]

Agreed, the extra length on overnight pads means it wraps around enough to still be underneath me when I'm horizontal and not vertical.

[schneefink]

Took me a minute to understand that by "vertical" you probably mean on your side, I was very confused wondering why you would be standing on the bed ^^

[james]

Actually what i do is wear pj shorts to bed and use big tampons plus pad. And wake u several times during the night, paranoid and head for the bathroom to check. Heavy flow day/nights are not restful.

[schneefink]

I do that sometimes but I hate it -.- Being cranky because I'm tired too is just what I need when I have my period.

[naye]

I used to menstruate but now I'm using an IUD that has stopped it, which is marvelous

[schneefink]

That sounds very convenient!

[alessandriana]

I bought a few pairs of Thinx recently, which supposedly help with preventing that kind of thing. (I combine them with heavy duty overnight super long pads.) My issue was generally that pads alone would leak around the edges, so I'm hoping the Thinx will help. Can't confirm or deny yet.

[schneefink]

Fingers crossed that it works!

[vicki_rae]

Navy blue sheets and the heavy duty cycle in the washer with cold water.

Don't have uterus or ovaries anymore but I always used heavy duty tampons along with the longest most heavy duty pads and overnight was still a problem.

Easy to say this 24 years after beating ovarian cancer, but I'm entirely serious when I say that cancer surgery and four months of chemo was a fair trade for also getting rid of the endometriosis massively festooning my insides.

[schneefink]

Ouch, yeah, from the terrible things I've read about endometriosis I can imagine that getting rid of that is worth a lot.

[melannen]

I am never sure just how bad it really is when people describe that: I have never woken up in the middle of a Spaghetti Western - either I don't bleed enough or I don't thrash enough - but I have occasionally woken up with multiple coin-size spots or even what might be charitably described as a small puddle.

Anecdotally, though - both mine and other people's - bedsheet ruining tends to get a lot less frequent if you stop using disposable pads at night. The problem is that they have that impermeable plastic liner, and once they hit the limit of absorption, the rest of the blood pools on the plastic layer and then just sheets right off like rain in a roof gutter. Leading to large puddley spots that soak through everything under where the leak is, very quickly.

Without that plastic layer, though, there's nothing for it to pool up on, so it just slowly seeps by capillary action into whatever layer of cloth is nearest, which is usually underwear, and if it soaks all the way through those too, the crotch of your pants. I switched to all-cotton pads as soon as I was old enough to buy my own supplies, and I quickly realized that, a) I was ruining the crotches of a lot of pajama pants, but a lot fewer sets of sheets, and b) if I soaked through my pad during the day, instead of a huge embarrassing spot right where it was visible to everyone behind me, it was in the crotch of my jeans and I could just sit with my legs together and NOBODY WOULD KNOW, it was great.

(I now use a cup instead and it's so much more convenient, but when it gets too full, you get an ENTIRE CUPFUL POURING OUT AT ONCE, and if you happen to be moving just the wrong way when it happens, it squirts. :D Hello stained sheets again.)

[schneefink]

The biggest blood stains I get are about the size of one spread hand, but that's annoying enough. More often just a few small spots. I use a cup but I need pads too because maybe I don't always insert it correctly but it doesn't work 100%. I haven't tried cotton pads yet.

[melannen]

I have never tried cotton pads + cup; I don't know if it would be enough to deal with a full cup spill. (these days, I don't usually bleed enough to overflow the cup at night, except a couple times a year when it just goes all out, but I never have enough warning to prepare for those.) It might? I mostly only use pads these days for very light days at the end when the cup seems like too much trouble. But another nice thing about cotton pads is they stack, so you can just keep adding more (this doesn't work very well in the daytime, obviously, but when I was doing pads only sometimes I would just stick four or five in at night.) Yeah, cups seem to work differently for different people. But also it sounds like you might bleed more heavily than me, and when it reaches a certain level of full, it will leak, the end.

[sholio]

I appreciate the people who included things like "crying" and "rage" in their answers. XD I feel you.

[rachelmanija]

Same. Can you guess which answer was mine?

[sholio]

Well, based on you asking that, I'm guessing vampires.

[rachelmanija]

"Cold water and rage" also was a possibility!

[sholio]

Also an excellent one. :D

[schneefink]

Yeah same xD A hard to avoid part of the process.

[beatrice_otter]

Even at my heaviest, it's not a super-heavy flow gushing at any one time. As long as I use a long enough pad, I'm fine; or, at least, there will only be enough seepage to stain panties and PJs, not enough to get from there to the sheets.

As for how I get the stains out of my undies and PJs, well, for underwear I just use stain remover and wash it, and ignore whatever stains linger; and as for PJ bottoms, I have multiple pairs of red-with-some-sort-of-pattern PJ pants, such that blood stains don't show very well.

[schneefink]

Yeah, I'm the only one who sees my underwears and pyjamas so it's fine if the stains don't go away completely. (Maybe I should try to keep one pair clean for vacations and such.)

[extrapenguin]

My uterus wakes me up should my period start in the middle of the night! I've had at most coin-size blood spots, but since I sleep with black sheets, they're basically indetectable after the first wash cycle. (I do have a fitted sheet and mattress protector beneath that to protect the mattress, though.)

I don't bleed through pads, but my flow isn't particularly heavy, and I always use pads with wings so less risk of them coming loose. The bloodflow also slows when I'm horizontal. If I sleep on my back (very rare), there might be some bloodstains in my (black) underwear, but that's about it.

So, uh, maybe investigate alternative pad and sheet options?

[schneefink]

That is convenient! I do have two layers of mattress protection so that's fine, but my sheets are yellow - maybe the next ones should be darker.
Unfortunately I usually turn and sleep on my back during the night, otherwise it would be much less of a problem.

[lannamichaels]

I used to overlap the overnight pads and that was how I stopped getting blood on bedsheets. As for how to get it out, no idea, never really managed that reliably. These days I use a combination of birth control and maternity pads and so far haven't bled on the sheets.

[schneefink]

Not a bad idea!
Sometimes I can get the blood stains to disappear completely and sometimes traces remain no matter what I do, it's very annoying.

[frith_in_thorns]

I've got had period pants for my last 3 periods (by cheeky wipes in the UK, they are like 3 pairs for £20 ie not actually ridiculously expensive like all the other ones I've seen) and they work great! I don't think I have a particularly heavy flow though, I've never overfilled a pad.

[schneefink]

Great that you found something that works for you :) Every once in a while I bleed heavily so I'm skeptical if they'd work well for me, but maybe I'll try it out one day.