menstrualhut

A few days ago on

anti_tampon I was asking if anyone had experience using a diaphragm for blood containment. I got a couple of encouraging answers so I went ahead and tried it. I'm only about 36 hours in, but so far I am having great success! Unlike the Instead it seats easily inside me (of course, since it was custom-fitted to me!) and I have no trouble getting it into place. It has reliably stayed in place all day at work (yeah I had to work on a sunday. bleah. I don't usually) and I didn't even have to remove it to empty it - when I go to use the bathroom just exercising my muscles to urinate causes it to empty out! When I have a private bathroom I actually take it out and wash it, same as with my Keeper. It hasn't leaked yet, more than minor spotting and I think the spotting is from blood left around it after I squeeze it empty. The times when I actually took it out and washed it off before re-inserting I didn't even get spotting. I've definitely had worse leakage problems with The Keeper, Instead and tampons (when I used them I used NatraCare). I'm having moderate flow right now. I'm not sure how it would hold up under heavy flow - I might have to empty it often, since the capacity of it is I am sure smaller than the Insteads or Keeper, but as of today it did not fill up faster than my bladder did so I had no problems.

I'm very pleased. So far this is working better than any other menstrual blood solution I've tried yet! Downside is, of course, you can't get one without a gynecologist's prescription. A friend asked me in my personal journal if I was worried about it wearing out faster due to long-term use. I'm not really worried about wearing out its ability to be used as birth control since I am currently on BCPs for that reason and the diaphragm I have is just leftover from before I was on those. I haven't actually used it for pregnancy prevention in years and if I were to start doing so again I would get a new prescription.

Am still interested in hearing from other people who have tried this.

Crossposted to

anti_tampon, but I figured it would be of interest to people here as well.