You know that feeling when your period starts… and your heart just sinks?
Not because of the inconvenience.
But because you know what's coming.
The flooding. The clots. The cramping so severe that you can't stand straight. The embarrassment of soaking through everything — no matter what you try.
Why is this happening to me again? I just want one normal month. Just one.
You've cancelled plans you were looking forward to. You've made excuses — headache, stress, "not feeling well" — because you can't explain what's actually going on inside your body. Not to your friends. Not to your colleagues. And especially not to your husband.
You've woken up at 3am in a cold sweat, feeling that familiar gush, and your first thought wasn't pain — it was Did I ruin the mattress, again?
You've stood in the bathroom for long minutes, just staring at nothing, trying to hold yourself together.
Because you're supposed to be strong. You're supposed to be okay. And you've told yourself that enough times now that some days you almost believe it.
But you're tired. Genuinely tired. Not just the physical tiredness ( although that is very real too).
You're tired of the bloating that makes you look six months pregnant by the afternoon.
Tired of the back pain that starts two weeks before your period even arrives.
Tired of watching your friends get pregnant easily while you quietly carry this secret fear that maybe — maybe — your body is too broken to carry another child.
You've spent money. Real money. On herbal teas from Instagram pages that promised results in 7 days. On supplements your cousin swore by. On consultations that ended with the doctor saying words that chilled you to your bones:
"We recommend surgery."
Surgery. Ha! They want to cut me open. They want to go inside me. What if something goes wrong? What if it grows back? What if—
All these thoughts ran through your mind as you went quiet in that consultation room. You nodded at whatever the doctor was saying. But deep inside, everything was screaming.
You went home and searched Google at midnight. You found forums and facebook groups full of women saying surgery didn't even work for them. That the fibroids came back. That the recovery was harder than anyone warned them. You cried into your pillow so your husband wouldn't hear.
Because he doesn't know the full extent of it, does he?
Maybe you've told him a little. But not everything. Not the fear. Not the desperation. Not the nights you've spent wondering if your body will ever feel like your own again.
You are carrying this almost entirely alone.
And I need you to know — I see you. I was you.
Drop everything you are doing now and listen to every word I'm about to say.
My Story — From Hiding in Bathrooms to Finally Feeling Like Myself Again
It started after my second pregnancy.
I didn't notice anything unusual at first. Just heavier periods. I thought it was my body recalibrating. My doctor at the time said the same thing — "It's normal after childbirth, it'll settle down."
It didn't settle down.
By the end of that year, I was bleeding so heavily that I could not leave the house for the first two days of my cycle. I ruined three mattresses in twelve months. I kept a change of clothes in my office drawer. I cancelled a trip to Abuja for a family event — told them I had a fever — because I knew what that weekend would look like for me.
The diagnosis came eighteen months later: multiple uterine fibroids.
The scan showed three of them. The largest was 6.5 centimetres.
I sat in that doctor's office and felt something collapse inside me. Not panic — not immediately. Just this quiet, devastating collapse.
I am broken. Something is wrong with me and I don't know how to fix it.
The emotional weight of it was something I hadn't prepared for. My husband — who is a kind, patient man, began to notice that something was off. I was withdrawing. I stopped initiating any kind of intimacy. I was irritable around my period in a way that frightened even me.
He would ask: "Are you okay? You seem far away."
And I would say yes. Because explaining felt impossible. Because I was ashamed, even though I knew logically that I had no reason to be. Shame doesn't respond to logic.
The distance between us grew. Slowly. Quietly. In the way that marriages erode — not through arguments but through absence.
I Tried Everything. I Mean Everything.
The first thing I tried was an herbal tea from an Instagram vendor. I won't name them because that's not the point. The point is that I spent ₦18,000, drank it religiously for six weeks, and my next period was the worst I'd ever had.
Then came Vitex — a supplement well-known in the fibroid community. I also tried evening primrose oil. I took them both for four months. My cousin had heard they helped with hormone balance. Maybe they do for some women. For me, they did absolutely nothing.
I cut out red meat entirely. I read every article about "fibroid-shrinking diets." I avoided dairy. I ate more leafy vegetables. I drank more water. Nothing shifted.
I went back to the hospital — a different, more expensive one. Paid for a private consultation. The doctor was thorough and professional, and at the end of a very long appointment, she said the same thing the first doctor had said: "We should discuss surgical options."
I spent money on over-the-counter pain medication every single month. Ibuprofen, mefenamic acid. They blunted the edge of the pain. They did not touch the bleeding.
I prayed. I don't say that with any disrespect — I believe in prayer deeply. But I also believe that God very often answers prayer through people, through knowledge, through the right encounter at the right time. Prayer without action felt incomplete. I knew something was missing. I just didn't know what.
Delta State (Nigeria ) Changed My Life
My grandmother — Mama Chika — is 85 years old. She lives in Delta State, in the same compound she has lived in for over fifty years. She was a midwife for more than three decades. A traditional birth attendant. Women from three surrounding villages still call her name when they have reproductive problems.
I hadn't visited in almost two years when we made the trip for a family burial gathering.
It was a large gathering, and I spent half of that first evening excusing myself.
The cramping had started two days before the event. By the time we arrived, I was barely managing. I kept slipping away to the bathroom, to the quiet back room, to anywhere I could be invisible for a few minutes.
But My Grandmother noticed.
She said nothing during the day. But that evening, when the compound had grown quieter, she appeared beside me where I was sitting alone.
She sat down, but didn't say anything immediately. Then she placed her hand on my arm and said, very quietly:
"Nne. What is going on with you?"
That was all it took. I started crying. Right there, in the dim light of my grandmother's compound, I told her everything. The diagnosis. The bleeding. The failed remedies. The fear of surgery. The distance in my marriage. All of it.
She listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said:
"The teas don't work because they are treating the symptom. The bleeding is not the problem — it's the signal. Your oestrogen is unbalanced and your womb is inflamed. Everything you were told to eat and drink was addressing the wrong thing."
She paused.
"Come early tomorrow morning. Before the compound wakes up. I will show you what I have been showing women for forty years."
I Almost Didn't Believe Her
Honestly? I sat there that night with a complicated feeling in my chest.
Part of me was moved. Part of me was hopeful. But another part — the part that had spent months buying supplements and drinking bitter teas — was quietly guarded.
If it was this simple, why hadn't I found it already? Why hadn't any doctor mentioned it? Why wasn't everyone doing this?
I went to her the next morning anyway. Because what did I have to lose?
What she showed me over the next two days was a 90-day protocol — not a magic cure, but a structured system — using anti-inflammatory Nigerian foods I could find in any market, specific meal timing, a seed cycling method adapted for our local diet, castor oil compress rituals for the lower abdomen, and lifestyle adjustments to reduce the oestrogen dominance that was feeding the fibroids.
It was not complicated. That was the most disorienting part. It was so practical, so grounded in the food and rhythms of daily Nigerian life, that I kept asking: "But is that all? Really?"
And she smiled and said: "That is everything."
The First Ten Days
I started the protocol the week after I returned to Lagos.
The first few days, nothing happened. I remember checking in with myself each morning, almost impatiently. Any different? No? Okay. Maybe it's too early.
By day six, I noticed the bloating was slightly less severe than usual. I told myself I was imagining it.
By day ten — I remember the exact morning — I woke up and realised that my lower back didn't ache. It always ached. That persistent low-level ache had been my constant companion for so long that I had stopped noticing it as pain and started accepting it as just… how my body felt.
That morning, it was gone.
I stood very still in my kitchen for a moment, just noticing the absence of it. Feeling the quiet.
And something shifted in me. Not certainty yet. But hope. Real hope, for the first time in years.
By the Second Cycle
My second menstrual cycle on the protocol was the moment everything became undeniable.
The bleeding was lighter. Genuinely lighter — not marginally, not "maybe my imagination," but measurably, obviously lighter. The clotting had reduced. The cramping was present but manageable — nothing like the floor-level pain I had been living with.
I finished my cycle without a single ruined item of clothing. Without cancelling any plans. Without hiding.
I sat on my bed afterwards and cried — but not the kind of crying I was used to. This was relief. Pure relief flooding out of me.
The Moment My Husband Noticed
It was a Sunday evening, about six weeks into the protocol. We were sitting together after dinner — nothing special, just an ordinary evening — when he turned to look at me.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said:
"You're smiling again… and for the first time in months, and you're not afraid of your own body anymore."
I didn't know how to respond. I hadn't told him everything that had happened — not yet. But I realised in that moment that he had seen it all along. The withdrawal. The fear. The woman who used to be present and had gone somewhere he couldn't reach.
And now she was coming back.
We talked properly that night. For the first time in nearly a year, we truly talked. That conversation healed something between us that I hadn't even fully acknowledged was broken.
The Other Women My Grandma Helped
I later found out I wasn't the only one Grandma Chika had spoken to quietly that weekend.
There was another woman — a relative's wife from Warri, in her early thirties — who had been struggling with painful periods and fertility challenges for two years. She also got the protocol. Within three cycles, her bleeding had normalised. She messaged me eight weeks later with a scan image in her hands and tears streaming down her face.
Another woman — older, mid-forties, from Asaba — had been living with a large fibroid for years and had refused surgery twice. She started the protocol quietly. She told me five months later that her gynecologist was surprised by her scan results. "Whatever you're doing," the doctor apparently said, "keep doing it."
After I shared my own story privately with a small group of women who had been asking for help, the requests started coming in faster than I could respond to individually.
That is why I decided to write it all down.
