Amazingly, The Boy and I didn't break up, although the stress of a major move, looking for work and that laid-back Northern California vibe got to me. (My hair was always too clean at parties, and why did I need a pea coat in August?) I got sick. A lot. Womanly issues. UTIs. Too much sex and not enough health insurance. Things in life and between my legs eventually calmed down, but I was still spotting between periods, which I told my doctor during my yearly exam.

"Are you taking the pill at the same time every day?" she asked.

"Yeah, between seven a.m. and noon," I replied. You know, the exact period of time I wake up in the morning.

She told me it would be best if I took it at precisely the same time every day. Or, as an alternative, she held up the blue gummy bracelet I'd worn on my wrist during the '80s, and told me I should stick it up my vagina. I eyed the ring suspiciously. Why do all birth control devices have one-word names with "the" attached as a prefix? Frodo wouldn't go near this bad boy.

Sensing my reiticence, she opened a drawer, removed a small, pink square and, with a flourish, thrust it aloft: The Patch.

The Patch is a hormone-delivery system that looks like an oversized BandAid. It comes in one shade, "flesh," though it certainly didn't match my whale-bone skin. A woman affixes the patch on one of four areas: the upper torso (back or front, but not the boobies), the upper arm, the lower back, or the buttocks. Hormones are absorbed through the skin. After seven days it sloughs itself off like a snake's skin, and a small alien bursts through your intestinal lining, hopefully while you're sleeping.

No, of course not. If the FDA had tested an alien patch, they would have sold it to the military, not women. At any rate, you apply one per week for three weeks, and on the fourth week you bleed but you don't have a baby.

The doctor promised me exactly what Johnson & Johnson reps had promised hundreds of thousands of women: that the patch offered lower estrogen than the pill, therefore I'd have fewer side effects and health risks. Unfortunately for me, the 3,000 women who are suing Johnson & Johnson and the fifty who died, they were wrong.

I got off easy. We're conditioned to ignore possible side effects (bloodclotsstrokeheartattacks… lionsandtigersandbearsohmy!) just like we're conditioned to ignore that when we board a passenger plane, we're thirty thousand feet and one small mechanical malfunction away from certain death.

Luckily, my own patch story spans only twenty-four hours.