Heavy periods wear you out in a way that goes well beyond the physical side of things. There’s the mental load of planning your whole life round your cycle, the constant checking, the plans you end up cancelling, and that sinking feeling that creeps in weeks before the first day even turns up. Loads of women spend years just putting up with it and cracking on, because they’ve come to think that’s simply how it is for them.

Thing is, it doesn’t have to be like that at all, and more people really ought to be saying so out loud.

Doctors sometimes call heavy bleeding menorrhagia, and it’s dead common, with around one in three women reckoned to have periods heavy enough to mess up their day to day life at some point or other. Even so, loads of them have no idea there’s anything out there that’d help, or they’d feel a bit daft bringing it up with the GP. So they keep muddling through with double protection, dark clothes and a lot of crossed fingers.

What Actually Counts as Heavy?

This is where it gets a bit murky, because there’s no single standard for what a normal period looks like. Most women end up comparing themselves to their mates, their mum or their sister, and assume whatever they go through must be the baseline. On paper, losing more than 80ml of blood in a cycle counts as heavy, but that’s hardly something you can measure in the bathroom at home.

The signs that tend to be more useful are things like soaking through a pad or tampon every hour for a few hours on the trot, regularly passing big clots, bleeding for more than seven days, or feeling completely drained during your period, which is often down to anaemia. If any of that rings a bell, it’s a good idea to have a chat with your GP instead of assuming it’s just your normal.

There’s also what you could call the impact test, though it’s nowhere near as formal as it sounds. If your period stops you doing things you’d otherwise do, whether that’s going to work, getting to the gym or simply leaving the house without worrying, then that’s already reason enough to look into your options. You don’t have to hit some clinical number before your experience counts for something.

Read: Memory Care vs. Assisted Living: How to Tell Which One Your Parent Needs

So What Is Tranexamic Acid and How Does It Work?

GPs hand out tranexamic acid for heavy periods all the time, and a lot of women are a bit taken aback the first time somebody mentions it to them. For a start it’s not a hormone, and that matters loads if you’ve already decided you don’t want to go down the hormone route. It works by helping your blood clot better while you’re on your period, so you lose less blood overall, and studies have found it can cut menstrual blood loss by around 40 to 50 percent in some women, which is a massive difference.

You only take it for the first few days of your period while you’re actually bleeding, so there’s no daily tablet to remember the rest of the month. It doesn’t affect your fertility or mess with ovulation either, so it’s a handy option if you’re trying for a baby or you just don’t fancy taking something every single day.

Tranexamic acid tablets are available on prescription from your GP here in the UK, and these days there are also regulated ways to get them online through licensed pharmacies and services. That can take a lot of the hassle out of it if you’d rather not sit in front of somebody and talk through your periods face to face. The medicine has been around for decades and has a well-known safety record, though it won’t suit everyone, especially anyone with a history of blood clots.

It’s About More Than Just Managing Symptoms

There’s a wider conversation going on, slowly, about how women’s health has been under-researched and under-treated for years, and heavy periods sit slap bang in the middle of it. For a long time the advice was more or less to take some ibuprofen and get on with it. That’s starting to change, though nowhere near as quickly as it should.

You can’t sort anything out until you know what’s on offer, though. Ask women who’ve finally had their heavy periods treated and a lot of them will tell you they’re a bit narked nobody mentioned it years ago, back when they thought they’d just have to grin and bear it. If that’s you at the minute, pop in and have a word with a pharmacist or book in with your GP to go through what’s available. Tranexamic acid isn’t going to suit everybody, but for loads of women it’s made a proper difference to getting through the month, and after years of struggling on that counts for a lot.