It happens. In the beginning, it's traumatic. It continues to be traumatic.
But it's just one of those fun things about being a girl.
Unbeknownst to us, before we talked to our friend Karen, a
nurse practitioner who works with adolescents,
there is an official name for normal vaginal discharge --
leukorrhea. It may sound like a disease,
but it's just business as usual.
It starts to happen around the time of puberty, when your period starts.
For the first couple of years of your period,
your hormones are fluctuating.
Before you start ovulating
regularly, your discharge doesn't usually have
any color other
than clear, cloudy, or perhaps whitish.
When your cycle becomes more regular, your vaginal discharge situation
will change with your hormonal levels. At the middle of
your cycle, near when you ovulate, your estrogens are high.
You tend to have copious watery secretions. They are kind of like a clearish runny nose ... the stuff that you can sort of stretch between your fingers. Sorry, that was disgusting. Karen told us you could do that.
In the second half of the cycle, because of your rising progesterone levels, you get a stickier, scantier kind of discharge.
If your discharge is different than this, you might have a problem and should probably talk
to your health care practitioner.
