As a woman, one of the most important basic things is understanding our bodies and how hormones affect our health. To be honest, I never really cared about hormones and how they impacted my daily life, mood, anxiety, and even acne. I was ignorant. To me, hormonal education was for the doctors or people who wanted to venture into the field of medicine. I didn’t want to venture into medicine, so why would I fill my mind with a lot of “unnecessary hormonal details” right?
Then something happened that completely changed my perspective. While on campus one of my closest friends was diagnosed with Stage 3 endometriosis. The doctors advised that she should get pregnant before getting to stage 4 endometriosis, or else she would be infertile. She was very young and wasn’t ready to have a child and that was a turning point in my life.
I recall the many times she would complain of severe cramping and the many lessons she had missed each month since she couldn’t attend classes. If only she had been keen on what her body was communicating maybe she could have avoided some things, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten to stage 3 endometriosis. Her story inspired me to do an endometriosis awareness campaign project while on campus. Since then, I have always urged my female friends to be keen about our their biomarkers and what their body communicates to them.
Knowledge is power! With an understanding of how your body works, there is no limit to what you can’t control. You can track your health and know which hormones are active in the body, you can avoid pregnancy by knowing your safe days. You can achieve pregnancy by understanding and knowing your fertile days. You simply have to be keen about your biomarkers!
Fertility Education and Medical Management (FEMM) is a knowledge-based health program for women that has been proved effective. Without knowledge about the hormonal interplay of your cycle, your ability to make empowered, informed health decisions are hindered.
Through FEMM, all this information has been simplified to make it easier for every woman to understand her body by monitoring hormonal and other indicators of her health. To simplify it even further, FEMM has both an Android and an IOS App. All you have to do is fill in your daily observations or biomarkers and the app will do the rest to help you monitor your health. In case there are inconsistencies you can even schedule a session with a qualified FEMM teacher who will guide and help you track your health or a FEMM doctor to help you out in a case where there are complications.
Ladies! The more you know the more you control! Let’s embrace FEMM and take control of our Health.
Published: March 22, 2021
Written by Joy Wangui, a WYA Africa Batch 1 2021 intern from Kenya.
