Period Hormones & Work Mistakes

[ItsAllDiodes]

TLDR; My period makes me loopy and causes mistakes at work that wreck my boss' opinion of me and may be threatening my job. Advice?

FULL:

I'm 24 and have been struggling balancing my period symptoms with my career. I'm a full-time student working part-time on weekends (I've been in the workforce full-time, but stopped to go back to school), and at every job I've been at, I've had issues caused by my period. I feel like I have the pain under control, can stifle the mood swings pretty well, and have resolved some other physical issues that used to be a problem, but the thing I'm struggling with is that I'm just so LOOPY when I'm on my period. This isn't so much an issue with school because I can balance out some of my lesser grades (and I'm still talking passing grades here; I'm a pretty good student) with my better ones and still end up with a really good average. But work has been harder to balance--specifically, if I'm working inventory (we do this every shift) and for some reason my brain decides there's three pallets of X instead of four even as I'm counting them, or it adds/multiplies wrong, etc etc. In the past year, there's only been about three times it's come up as an issue (my supervisor calls if there's a major discrepancy on a specific item, which is a fun chat on period-brain), but there have been company-wide emails each time it's happened about precision in inventory and it's getting clear that my job might be in peril if this continues. Has anyone has to deal with this before??? How did you manage it???

I guess plenty of people probably deal with this, but I can't help being terrified that I'm practically unemployable because of my 3-day-a-month error-fests. Especially since I'm going into STEM and precision is pretty important.

Thank you for any advice you can give.

[jns]

It sounds like your period may be breaking down the control you have. Maybe one of the others will have a more specific answer. Beautiful Disaster , atskitty2 , Claret : suggestions? For some women, birth control medication seems to lessen their symptoms from what I have read and been told.

I have diagnosed myself as being partially dyslexic. I have a number of coping mechanisms to back check things in different ways to minimize mistakes. I wonder if you are dealing with the same thing.

[Claret]

You need to get a definitive diagnosis and work to even out whatever is going on with your body that is affecting your brain function. I know this sounds trite, but, the hormones rise and fall at predictable intervals. You can regulate them (the concentration of them ) by taking various medications. Birth control pills could be the easiest, but there are other hormones that can be regulated as well. Please get to a doctor that can do a full work up on you.