It was just as I was gunning the engine and beginning my journey across five lanes of traffic that I felt it: the cheek bulge. The stomach roil. The acidic white foam in the throat.

There was no time and nowhere to stop. I couldn't open the car door or window. If I took my eyes off the road for one second I would hit someone, or be flattened by the multiple big rigs roaring behind me. So I did the two things my body dictated: I stayed alive by continuing to drive, and I locked my knees together and puked in my lap.

I was wearing fern-green corduroy pants (why not? It's Oakland). I pushed my legs together tightly to create a leak-free pooling area. And right before it began, I smiled. Because as awful as it was about to get, this shit was pretty funny. And then I opened my mouth, pushed my neck forward like a baby bird, and puked my guts out.

And cried just a little.

There was a small amount of splatter on the wheel, but other than that The Boy's car was miraculously unharmed. My cords were not: the large crotch stain caused quite a few double-takes as I walked into my building. When I finally got a call back from my doctor's office, the nurse said, "Are you sure you don't have the flu? It sounds like you have a stomach flu." Bitch, no, I wanted to say. Instead, I hung up and ripped off the patch.

That was 2004. Just this year, I was telling a new doctor here on the East Coast that I'd tried the patch once, but it had made me so sick I could only use it for one day. "Well, that's your problem," he said, leaning back behind his big, wooden desk. "You didn't give it enough of a chance."

The Ortho Evra website now lists all of these symptoms, including "nausea and/or vomiting, application site reaction, breast symptoms, headache, and emotional lability," as well as blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, and "the risk of venous thromboembolic events." It also offers a confusingly worded warning about the extra estrogen in the patch: "You will be exposed to about 60% more estrogen if you use ORTHO EVRA® than if you use a typical birth control pill containing 35 micrograms of estrogen."

I'm embarrassed that, despite all my misgivings about hormonal birth control (not to mention its effects on fish!), I went back on the pill, ignoring the warnings until my face began changing color. Welcome to the wonderful world of melasma. For me, it meant waxing my peach-fuzz mustache, then discovering skin discoloration underneath in the exact shape and shade of a Hitler 'stache.

So, with vanity winning out over puke, chemicals and feminism, I went off the pill three weeks ago. It hasn't been smooth sailing — my lady parts are sore, I've gained five pounds and I'm moodier than Meredith Grey. But it feels great to share the burden of reproductive choice in my relationship.

Who knows if my upper lip will ever return to its normal color. I'm unsure as to which long-term contraceptive option I'll choose, where the best place to snag free condoms is, or what the hell is the attraction of "ribbed for her pleasure." But I am certain of one thing, both for Johnson & Johnson and society as a whole: when it comes to the messy task of pregnancy prevention, it's time for some shared responsibility.  n°

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Nicole Ankowski has lived in Ohio, Oakland, and on the high plains of South Dakota, but is now proud to call Brooklyn home. She wrote for alternative weekly papers in the first two states, and tried to learn Lakota in the last. (The vowels can be tricky.) She just earned her MFA in Creative Writing and has been published in Beeswax literary journal. She is unable to resist good writing or bad TV.