If “bloody period” is all that you can utter when you are bleeding like a pig, you need a crash course on menstruation terms. No, this is not a vocabulary test nor a technical science textbook, but a page to better educate you about your being a woman. Read on and find out what is more to the term “menstruation.”

• AMENORRHEA. Can you recall days when you just feel like staying inside your room because moving around will give you cramps? Have you ever locked yourself in the bathroom because you wanted to get rid of the rusty smell your private organ and blood are emitting? Well, some women just cannot understand your ordeal.

A term that means absence of menstrual cycles, amenorrhea afflicts a very small percentage of the female population. The absence of menstruation is linked with the inability to bear children, if the condition remains unfixed. Some women would rather leave amenorrhea untreated than invest in birth control pills and other contraceptive methods – but this decision is not without costs. If you have amenorrhea, you may suffer from low libido, headaches, weight gain, abnormal hair growth and tampered vision.

According to medical health professionals, for you to be diagnosed with amenorrhea and for you not to mistake amenorrhea with irregular period, you must have skipped at least three consecutive months of regular menstrual cycle. The only exception is when you are pregnant.

• DYSMENORRHEA. A common lot for ladies who have not had sexual intercourse yet and for the overstressed worry warts, dysmenorrhea is a condition that may either precede or accompany menstruation.

In dysmenorrhea, what happens is that your uterine wall contracts, as it responds to the release of prostaglandins during your period. The contractions help squeeze out the deteriorated uterine wall from your body and are then responsible for the discomforts your body may be experiencing.

The symptoms of dysmenorrhea come in different packages and varying degrees, and may include nausea, excessive or low blood flow, muscular cramps (usually in the leg and hip area) and abdominal pain which may be further described as throbbing, shooting or burning. Pain relievers and a little alcohol may ease the pain, but the best advice is to minimize your intake of over-salty or over-sweet food, as well as to live an active lifestyle so as to facilitate smoother and better blood circulation throughout your body.

• EUMENORRHEA. You deserve a pat on the back if your menstrual cycle can be described as eumenorrhea. In its simplest sense, eumenorrhea is just a medical term that is synonymous to normal menstruation. No amenorrheal and dysmenorrheal discomforts and pains are there to plague you, just the usual inconveniences of having to buy and change your pads regularly and having to occasionally put up with the smell of blood.

The next time a medical student or practitioner wattles out a word or two about any of these terms, nod your head and smile. You now know that amenorrhea stands for the absence of menstruation, dysmenorrhea for the combo of discomforts and abdominal pains that may precede or accompany menstruation, and eumenorrhea for normal menstruation.