What's charting? It's a person taking and keeping notes about their menstrual and fertility cycles. Those notes may be as little information as what days you get your period, may have more information, like what kind of flow you had and what discharges you experienced that month, or have just about anything and everything you can think of that does or may have something to do with your fertility cycle: your basal temperatures (a vaginal temp you take daily with a thermometer made for that purpose), your libido, your sleep patterns, the whole works. What information you include depends on what you want to observe, and what your needs in charting are.

When you hear about people charting their periods or overall fertility cycles, it's usually either about trying to conceive or using natural family planning (NFP or FAM) as a primary method of birth control. Many of you are not trying to conceive, and for younger people, NFP isn't a sound sole or primary method for you either because your ...

Earlier this week, I drove over to my very awesome local sexual health clinic, willingly had my upper left arm anaesthetized, and got a matchstick-sized piece of plastic jammed under the skin just for the heck of it. Well, okay, not exactly...

What I really did was get Implanon inserted, and it was actually a very neat experience. A couple of weeks ago, I'd had a long consultation with one of the doctors at the clinic to talk about whether Implanon would be a good choice for me (the blog entry about that is here) and I decided that even with the potential side effects, it sounded like a pretty darn good idea. No pill to take every day? Cool! No shot every three months? Great! No patch to irritate my skin or ring to irritate my vagina? Even better! Very effective contraception for three whole years? Absolutely fabulous!

At my consultation appointment, once I was sure Implanon was what I wanted, I was given a prescription for the implant. I think some clinics keep a stock on...