Periods

Nobody measures how much blood you lose, and there is no number that makes a period officially heavy. What a clinician goes by is the effect. Changing a pad or tampon every one to two hours for several hours. Bleeding through onto clothes or bedding. Clots bigger than a ten-rupee coin. Planning your days around your period. Any of those is enough to ask about. Two things make that appointment more useful. Count pads over two or three cycles and note whether they were soaked or lightly used — that turns "a lot" into something she can work with. And ask for your haemoglobin and your ferritin, not just haemoglobin: heavy periods are one of the commonest reasons for iron deficiency in women in India, and the tiredness gets put down to something else for years. Go the same day if you are soaking a pad every hour for two hours or more, if you feel faint or breathless, or if you are or could be pregnant and you are bleeding. This is a written short explanation from AskHer's editorial team, not a recording — there is no video of it yet. It was written from the full explanation linked on this page and the sources listed there, and it has not been signed off by a clinician registered in India. It is general education, not advice about your own situation.

Bleeding between periods, or after sex, is worth having looked at even when it is light and even when it settles on its own. Most of the causes turn out to be minor — a cervical polyp or ectropion, an infection, the first few months on a new hormonal contraceptive, a missed pill, fibroids. A small number are not, and those are far more treatable when they are found early. That is the whole reason this one is assessed rather than watched. Bleeding after sex specifically points towards the cervix, which is why an examination usually forms part of the assessment. And cervical screening is not the same thing: screening is a test for women with no symptoms, and a normal screening result does not explain a symptom you have now. One firm rule: any bleeding at all more than a year after your periods stopped is assessed urgently. Even once. Even a smear. This is a written short explanation from AskHer's editorial team, not a recording — there is no video of it yet. It was written from the full explanation linked on this page and the sources listed there, and it has not been signed off by a clinician registered in India. It is general education, not advice about your own situation.