Erik Lavoie's Ex-girlfriend

VICE: It must have been hard to resist having Erik Lavoie’s babies. What did you use for birth control?

Martine

: Dating Erik Lavoie was a nightmare. That’s right. Dating the most magical and incredible human being of all time is not what you’d think. It’s too intense.

I had people following me down the street and trying to touch me. I would get flowers at work from strangers that simply said, “Thank you.” I even had young girls getting tattoos of me and calling me “the chosen one.” It was too much. Of course, this all changed when word got out I was using birth control. Even my doctor advised against it. I think he tried giving me sugar pills for a while because, as he put it, “I couldn’t possibly be in my right mind to not want to deliver The Great One’s children.” Eventually, it got to me. The women screaming “Baby Killer!” outside my window and the shunning from my own family led me to despise myself. After Erik would ejaculate inside my dead womb, I’d swear I could hear children crying outside. My doctor asked me how the pill’s level of estrogen was affecting me and I couldn’t tell him. I was so stressed out and confused by all the other factors that I had no idea what my personal health situation was. That’s probably how the Dalai Lama’s wife feels. I wasn’t myself. I was Erik Lavoie’s girlfriend. And so, I ran away.

Today I live in a rural area outside of Montreal called St. Jovite. People don’t know me here and I feel better. I feel like myself again. So yeah, if you want to know the physical side effects of being on the pill, Erik Lavoie’s ex-girlfriend is not the right person to ask. You’re going to have to ask someone else.

OK, we will.

MARGOT

I took the pill for six months in 2001, because I hadn’t had my period in four months and I wanted to regulate it. I stopped in March 2002, but started back up this March for birth control purposes. I forgot to take my pills with me when I went out of town this weekend, so I missed Friday and Saturday. On Sunday night I took two, then one on Monday morning, then another on Monday night to catch up. I didn’t read the instructions. I just figured it would be OK. But then I started bleeding and it hasn’t stopped for a couple days. It’s very dark brown and gross, not like my period. My period isn’t due for another week, so I think this will probably fuck it up. And it hurts my stomach and feels a bit like a bladder infection.

GIA

I took Depo-Provera when I was eighteen. I was in a long-term relationship, and was sick of having to use stupid condoms. But having to take a pill every day sounded like a drag. I also didn’t want to be reminded of the fact that I was putting hormones into my body on a daily basis, so Depo (a shot you get every three months) sounded like the best option. Plus, it was free, because I had health care at the time. At first, there were no side effects, and I was psyched. My period was regular for the first six months. But then suddenly some months I would have SEVERE cramps, followed by an insanely heavy period. I would have to change my tampon, like, every hour. After several months of that, my period stopped altogether. I didn’t get it for at least a year. My sex drive disappeared as well. I was totally turned off, and was completely uninterested in sex. Then my period changed yet again. This time, it was continuous for at least three months. At this point, I decided being on Depo was pointless—when I wanted to do it I was on the rag, and when I wasn’t, it was the last thing I wanted. I went to the doctor a number of times, and always she said what I was experiencing was normal. What a pain! My period is still totally irregular, so I am considering going on just a standard pill to regulate it, but as you can understand, I am pretty damn skeptical.

CHARLENE

After I gave birth to my daughter, my midwife was pushing me to get on something just to not get pregnant again. So about a month and a half after I had her, I went on Depo-Provera. They told me it would be safe to breastfeed. But instantly after getting the shot, I really felt ike there was another being inside of me. It was creepy. I took a long train ride home and decided to stop nursing my baby. How could it be safe if it felt so weird already? It was like I had Tourette’s. I was nasty to my boyfriend, and the second something came out of my mouth I wanted to take it back. I felt possessed. I gained about two dress sizes, too, but for the most part it just made me an unbearable bitch. I only took the one injection and I think it was in my system for a good, like, six to nine months. Now I’m on the low-estrogen pill and I feel nothing. No weight gain. No nastiness. I’m like, “Am I a cunt?” and my boyfriend’s like, “Nope, you’re good.”

EUGENIA
The first time I took it I was about sixteen, and I just kind of ballooned everywhere. Especially my boobs. They were, like, humongous. My poor boyfriend at the time must have been tripping out about it. He went to bed with Lucy Liu one night and woke up the next morning with Margaret Cho. I guess I would also pick fights more and just be more emotional and cry and stuff like that. But for me, the physical effects had a bigger impact. I stayed on that one for almost a year and then I was just like, “Fuck it. I can’t do it anymore.” I started on a different pill, Ortho, after a while. It was a lot milder, but my boobs grew another whole size again and I gained fifteen pounds. Back then, I was dancing, and we’d always be wearing like our leotards or whatever. And one day my girlfriends were just like, “Holy shit, when did your boobs get so big?” You probably don’t want to hear all this, but there were stretch marks. Just gross shit you don’t want to deal with. You’re like, what the fuck is happening to my body? The stretch marks aren’t permanent, thank god. Once you lose the weight they go away again. Now I just use condoms. Unless I have a serious, serious boyfriend, I’m not going to go on the pill again. HOLLY
The pill’s even more effective than doctors will have you believe, but for reasons they don’t emphasize strongly enough. Not only did it provide the necessary hormones to technically prevent pregnancy, it gave me this weird craving for sugary food and made me emotional, tired, hypersensitive, and it erased my libido. So yeah, it was really effective—who wants to have sex with a fat moody bitch who doesn’t want to have sex with them anyway? It also made me feel like the end of the world was nigh. Crying was something that was no longer confined to sad films, family bereavements, or physical pain. It was like being extremely premenstrual all of the time. The side effects kick in almost immediately, too. You fuck around. The pill doesn’t. All in all, it made me feel panicky and miserable, and I reacted quite viciously to the red welts that started to appear on my body like stigmata. You don’t expect to achieve stretch marks while trying to prevent pregnancy. NANCY
The first pill I took was Ortho-Tricyclen, which has a really high estrogen level and made me totally insane for a year. I was never, ever happy, and my life was shit. It also made my breasts ginormous, and it was painful because they were sore all the time. So I stopped taking it and they went back to normal the next day. I woke up and it was like a new dawn. I was happy and energetic again. I tried Loestrin, which has a lower estrogen level, but even that made me crazy. I only stayed on it for three months.
I’m taking this stuff now that’s new. It’s called Yasmin and so far it’s really good. It didn’t swell up my breasts and it makes my skin clear. It is kind of curbing my libido, though. Oh yeah, it makes my pee smell funny, too. Like…musky. Like grandma pee or something.

KENDRA
I went on the pill, and all of a sudden things were awful. Usually I know why I’m stressed out but this time I was like, “Hey, everything’s shitty. What’s different?” And that was it. It was like, “I’m bummed” and it was also, like, the kind of thing where you’re walking around and you’re like, “Clearly, I’m an asshole.” You know? That’s exactly what I felt like. Also, it totally affects your sex drive. You don’t want to make out. I was so uninterested and didn’t even care. And I’ve talked to other girls, and also guys, who are like, “It’s bad.”
There’s also the “forgetting to take the pill” disaster, and then having to double up. You have a 48-hour window where if you fuck up and forget, you just take it when you remember and then you just go back to the normal schedule and everything’s fine. But in my stoner years, sometimes that was sort of difficult.
I’m kind of anti-pill now. As I get older, it seems like my body’s more self-regulating, or maybe I’m more aware of that regulation. I feel like to disrupt it with synthetic things is actually really stupid. LINDA
You’re supposed to get some side effects––a little bloat, sometimes it affects your sex drive. But I was a fucking psycho on the pill at first. I lost some good friends, my parents were giving me sidelong glances, and I was totally suicidal. I started it because my doctors always thought I had endometriosis, and the pill staves that off. And then I had a cyst on my ovary burst when I was in college (it was gnarls), so they put me on the pill. I don’t have insurance, so a doctor friend writes me a script and I pay full price—$30 a month. If you do Planned Parenthood it might be cheaper, like, $10 a month. MINNA
At the beginning of last year, I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend without having to use a condom, and was scared of getting knocked up. (I also dreamed about bigger boobs!) So I went on the pill. Instead of getting bigger tits, I just ended up getting bigger all over—10 kilos’ weight gain in nine months, to be exact. I also felt really bloated and a lot moodier than before. I cry easily, but before the pill I was able to watch ER without crying every time. I didn’t have periods at all while I was on it, which might sound like a brilliant thing, but it felt quite odd. And after I decided to stop it, I still didn’t have my period for six months. It finally started again—now I get my period every ten days. Taking the pill completely destroyed my hormone balance. ALDENE
I think I suffer the same side effects as everybody else does—depression and weight gain. But getting pregnant would be far more annoying. Plus, I was just given some anti-depressants to help deal with the pill and that’s made drinking and smoking weed a lot more fun. KAMA
It’s totally hell to go on the pill. Either you’re emotionally high-strung, or if you’re at a higher dosage, you could end up spotting for weeks. Doctors always want you to stay on it for three months, even though it’s a nightmare. They’re like, “Just stay on it.” Then they say that if you went on a higher dosage it would mess your head up more, but if you went on a lower dosage you would get the spotting again. So they have to try to balance it out, which means you have to try each pill for three months.
I stayed on it for nearly a year, and when I stopped taking it, it was only about three days before I was feeling so much better. When I was younger, in New Zealand, I was on a different pill for seven years and never had a problem. It’s hard to find out what’s comparable here, though. ROBIN
I hadn’t been on it since I was sixteen, but I just went on again.
So far, I just feel kind of bloat-y. I think it’s just water, you know, the bloat-y feeling that girls kind of go through every month. But my friend just went on it too, like last week, and she’s breaking out with these humongous zits.
I also weld a lot, and I wonder how that affects my reproductive system. My dad was a welder, too, so he used be nervous for me like, “You know, there might be some of that electrical current kind of going through your body.” It makes me a little nervous. Last week, I was thinking about it, and maybe it’s a good method of birth control. SIGNE
I’m on a new one called Lo/Ovral now, and I don’t really have anything bad to say about it. It’s a low dosage, so instead of getting three different potencies of hormones, it’s the same low dosage. So you’re not all out of whack. I love it. I think it’s great, actually.
You hear that the pill is dangerous and it’s not natural. I was really concerned about it, so I asked my gynecologist. She said that actually the pill she put me on—I mean, I don’t know how conclusive the studies are—but it actually reduces the risk of uterine cancer or ovarian cancer. The female body is essentially a baby-making machine. And as soon as we get our period—I mean, I got mine at eleven—that’s Mother Nature telling me to start having babies. And I’m thirty years old and I still haven’t had a baby, and I don’t plan on having one for several years. So my body is not doing what it was designed to do. That’s pretty dangerous. If you’re not letting a machine do what it’s supposed to do, it can malfunction, i.e. I could get cancer. The pill is basically fooling my body into believing that it’s pregnant and into thinking that it’s doing what it’s meant to do. I actually haven’t done any research. I’m one of those people who just listens to what my doctor says. COMPILED BY VICE STAFF