I applied the patch at my boyfriend's apartment on a sunny Oakland Sunday. Ever afraid of commitment, I took a while to place it. The upper arm would be visible when I wore tank tops, the abdomen might chafe against a belt. I settled on the upper butt cheek. I figured it would be a turnoff during doggy-style sex, but lights could be turned off, too.

"How's it feel?" The Boy asked.

"It kind of burns," I said, realizing it did sting around the application area, like someone had lit a match and then blown it out, holding the heated head next to my skin.

The rest of the day, I napped fitfully. During sluggish waking moments, I demanded The Boy bring me pizza or the remote control. I said things like, "I really wanna tear this thing off me right now." Then I'd sprawl out and sleep again. At the time, I didn't notice anything unusual in this behavior. It was, after all, a Sunday.

The next morning I dragged myself out of bed before sunrise to begin my hour-long bus commute to Berkeley. I blamed my uneasy nausea on last night's pizza. I must have looked bad — in a glamorous, Britney Spears post-rehab sort of way, of course — because The Boy insisted I take his car to work. But at the office, I wasn't feeling any better. And then suddenly I knew I was going to throw up right now.

A little watery-eyed and weak, I went back to my cubicle pod feeling much better. Then, twenty minutes later, I was running back to the toilet. It went on like this all morning. By the fifth or sixth twenty-meter dash, I was only puking white foam. And my coworkers had noticed. "Why don't you go home?" they said. And, "Why don't you take off the patch?"

Practical suggestions. Except that a new side effect had begun to reveal itself. The best kind of medical side effect one could hope for: my breasts were growing. The night before, I'd felt a new springiness, and demanded The Boy feel me up, to see if he noticed too. (Then I'd slapped his hand away, since damn they were sore.) This was the one side effect the pill had always promised, and now, finally, it was here. I wasn't giving up on the patch that easily.

But I did concede that I'd drive home — even though I felt fine, post-puke — since what with all the vomiting, I wasn't getting any work done (and was frightening my podmates). Giddy, I drove away from Berkeley. The sun was glinting off the waves. My breasts were plumping. I cranked up NPR. It was a good day in the East Bay!

Now, as anyone who's driven from Berkeley into San Francisco knows, highway planners made an interesting choice when they decided to merge three freeways into one narrow junction at the edge of the bay. I-80, 580 and a dash of 880 traffic all converge in one wildly frenetic half-mile of freeway. Half the flow of cars from the left side of the highway is forced to merge mercilessly to the right as they jockey for the bridge, while people on the right thrust maniacally left to try to stay on 580. Throw in the IKEA exit that shoots off to the right, and you have a Beijing-grade traffic clusterfuck.