My first was a week before my fifteenth birthday... then it didn't happen again for nearly a year. My mother was convinced I was pregnant (so humiliating for the virgin I was... I'd just got over the shock of discovering I had a vagina when the first period hit, now I was supposed to have put something in it?) I had to go to the doctor's with her to confirm a) that I wasn't pregnant, and b) that I was virgo intacta. Anyway the second came shortly before my sixteenth, then six months later they finally kicked in regularly. And they were awful... so painful I threw up and fainted regularly. It got so bad that when I was at college my Dad often had to come in and drive me home because I'd puked, then passed out in my own vomit, and on coming to couldn't walk.

Best thing about pregnancy (physiologically speaking... the baby was the best thing) was that my periods stopped feeling like I was being stabbed repeatedly in the nether regions with a hot knife. It only hurt like hell... and they finally became regular when I was nursing my son.

But I have to say, the pain of my first few years menstruating was so bad that, if I had to go through them again, I'd seriously consider suicide. It was awful.