So I had my mirena for 4 years. Since then, I have a had some sy...

So I had my mirena for 4 years. Since then, I have a had some symptoms that I expected and a bunch of symptoms came up that I didn't realize may be related to the mirena. The bleeding was awful for the 1st 9 months....11-15 days of straight bleeding and then 2 weeks later it started all over again. After that it just stopped other than spotting like once a month or not at all. Recently it has just been inconsistent and spotting whenever. I have also been feeling tremendous exhaustion, moodiness that has been so extreme I couldn't deal with myself, consistently achy joints (I am only 29 now), increase in depression, headaches several days a week, constant lower backache and more. I had talked to a couple of friends who told me that they felt so much better once they had theirs removed. So before my annual this year, I decided to do some research and found this site. Some of the experiences women talked about here brought me so much relief because it sounded like they were taking words right out of my head. I couldn't believe how much of my symptoms were likely related to my mirena. I actually started drinking coffee daily just a couple of months after it was inserted because I was so tired I couldn't function. I had even seen my primary doctor who did bloodwork on 2 different occasions and could find no problems. I was just feeling overwhelmed and lost that I felt 60 instead of 29! So I went to my appointment 2 days ago with the decision made to have it removed and the next morning I woke up and my back pain was gone for the 1st time in years. I also felt an unusual sense of energy that afternoon and woke up pretty easily the last 2 mornings. I don't know if it is coincidental or if it really is the mirena, but I am confident in my decision to have had it removed and am looking forward to feeling like myself again! It did not hurt me to be removed. The actual papsmear was more uncomfortable. I will keep you all posted! Note to all of you who had this put in as an easy form of birth control, my doctor wanted me to stay off of hormones for the next 3 months to be sure that the mirena was in fact causing all of these symptoms, so it will be condoms for us......neither of us are very excited about this, and not that it would have changed my decision to remove it, but she told me that part afterward! Good luck and I hope my story helps!