IF someone wants you to get a Mirena be very, very cautious. I am very sensitive (or not at all sensitive, depending) to meds and that thing was an awful experience. It did let me delay having a hysterectomy for a year and if the hormones (which truly are almost nothing) hadn't been EVIL I might have avoided that altogether but when I had it done we'd discussed my sensitivity to hormones and decided that this was such a tiny amount that I'd be fine, plus nobody had heard of it causing problems and I was having surgery anyway so inserting it was easy. It took my extreme reaction of wanting to kill myself until it was removed and then almost immediately becoming more stable for my psychiatrist and gyn surgeon both to notice it in a few other patients, less severely than I'd reacted but enough to recommend removal.

The good thing is that if you try it and fail removal is easy but the hard thing is knowing if it is the cause of the problems. It was very hard to decide what to do about removing it; my gyn surgeon even said she had no real instinct for what to do. Ultimately we decided that since I was still having more bleeding than ideal and it could be causing the mood issue which no treatment had helped that we could always put a new one in if I felt there was no change from the loss of hormones. It came out and they showed it to me and as it became clear it was the problem it was so hard to believe something so tiny could cause so much horror.

Many people are fine with it. But I know it causes problems because "mirena bipolar" became one of the most frequently searched terms on my blog. I haven't asked my dr about finding more cases for a while. I got the impression they were considering doing a paper about it.

Oh thank God my neighbors' guests are leaving. Loud music and loud voices aren't helping me.......