How Safe are Safe Days, anyway?

Asha knew that something was terribly wrong. She had spent the first and second month trying to come to grips with it and gathering the courage she needed to approach the campus medical officer.  But how could things go so askew? Hadn’t she only had it in the safe confinement of her safe days? Or how safe were the safe days, anyway?

How safe are the safe days, anyway?

Knowing she was going to be sexually active, Asha had taken the liberty to educate herself on some basics of sex education. She read biology books and consulted friends. They shared to her a plethora of family planning methods she would use to beat the ova at its own game. She didn’t care about infections, or what other worse infection could she contract other than the one she already had?
A love inspects the distorted promise.
Among all the major FP advice she received, the one on safe days sounded ok and she had chosen to stick with it. And had she been faithful to her safe days! Didn’t matter what a guy promised or threatened, she wasn’t going to let her guard down during her unsafe days. But here she was now, two months into her freshman year and very pregnant already, the pregnancy edging towards its first trimester, and her towards the periphery of the insanity cliff. She was losing her mind, and there was no one to help her salvage it. For once, she wished that she at least maintained a constant boyfriend, she would go crying on his broad shoulders. He would pat her back and tell her everything would be ok. That he would take responsibility. That…that… Anything but this loneliness she felt at her most needful hour.

But all the men she had known in her life were monumental pricks. Most of them cared for nothing other than their thrust and release into a warm receptacle. It was a curse she had inherited from her father who she never knew but who she suspected might have hit the door frame the moment his disgusting seed hit her mother’s teenage fallopian tubes. Only that there had been no door frame to hit. According to what she had gathered, her mother had been a street urchin, was never married, and probably got raped by some bastardly urchin. She had then given her to catholic priest for adoption. And in had set what she considered as years of the most horrific sexual abuse any human being could ever suffer. She had left the cathedral one dark and stormy night. It was her boyfriend who had actually stolen her away when the Father Moses discovered they were dating, and threatened to kill her. For whatever reasons, Asha had taken the threat very seriously, and had successfully planned to elope with the boyfriend. Talk of leaping from the frying pan into the furnace!

That was in the past anyway. She had learned lessons of use and abuse, become a perfect implementer, and turned the hunter into the hunted. But she was pregnant now. Her safe days had backfired. Yet she knew she was not alone nor was it really strange for the safe days to boomerang. When she was learning, her friends had told her that true, the safe days were one of the available contraceptive methods, safer than most of them, less hectic and it had minimal side effects compared to others. But it was not completely foolproof. Now as she sat down on the hard bench outside the clinic waiting to see the snotty MO, she tried to remember what she had been told the loopholes were.

Change in climate, diet or lifestyle caused irregular menstrual cycles. She had changed all of them and she wasn’t even sure what had done it for her. She remembered advice she should have used when she relocated to the lake basin of the National University, the use of a thermometer to measure her daily temperature. Testing for sticky mucus in her vagina, Advice which would not help her in her present predicament, advice that was now the classic case of trying to lock the cage after the lion had already bolted. Hell, why was she even queuing outside the MO’s office waiting to see him? What good would come out of it? There was only one solution to her predicament, and slowly, Asha lifted herself from the bench and left the clinic through the backdoor. It was time to act like the headstrong girl the world had taught her to be.