Seasonale out of order?

December 21, 2007 7:45 PM

Are all of my "active" Seasonale tablets identical? Can I take them out of order?

I screwed up thanks to a screwy holiday schedule, and I forgot to take five pills in a row. Now my period has started three weeks earlier than scheduled. No big deal, I figured, I'll just start a new pack next week -- but it turns out that my prescription has expired, and my doctor is out for the holidays, so I won't be able to get a new pack until mid-next week at the earliest. But I need to start on Sunday!

I still have three weeks' worth of pills from the old pack. Is it okay if I just take those instead, starting on Sunday? The prescription information says each pack contains "84 pink active tablets each containing 0.15 mg of levonorgestrel, a synthetic progestogen and 0.03 mg of ethinyl estradiol." That means they're identical, right? (And if that's true, as soon as I get the new pack, I should just start taking those, in theory ...)

Thanks in advance.

posted by anonymous to health & fitness (8 comments total)

Yes, they're identical.
posted by ikkyu2 at 7:51 PM on December 21, 2007

yep, you'll be fine.
posted by thinkingwoman at 8:12 PM on December 21, 2007

Oh yeah, you're good. I've made this fuckup before.
posted by sperose at 9:54 PM on December 21, 2007

Identical. If the pills are different concentrations they're required by US law to have different number codes on them - so if pills look the same and have the same number, they're good.
posted by lrodman at 11:25 PM on December 21, 2007

But I need to start on Sunday!

I see you already have an answer to your question, but I wanted to point out that medically speaking, you don't have to start any particular day of the week. The only advantage to "Sunday start" is that you are less likely to get your period on the weekend.

(Of course, you may have a personal reason for needing to start on Sunday; I couldn't tell from the question.)
posted by Violet Hour at 11:43 PM on December 21, 2007

You're cool. Dunno if they still do this, since I haven't read the instructions in years, but the pill manufacturers used to recommend keeping a backup pack or two on hand for type of scenario. (i.e., no access to the "current" pack of pills.)
posted by desuetude at 10:19 AM on December 22, 2007

Wait a minute, how much time total have you gone without taking a pill? That's the important question here. If you go too many days you could be unprotected. Call your doctor.
posted by footnote at 2:07 PM on December 22, 2007

Five days missed mid-cycle means you're almost certainly unprotected until you're back on the pills again (I believe just three days is enough that, while you don't need to start over, they recommend a backup method for the next week). If you start day one of your period you're protected right away, with sunday start you need to wait a week until you can count on the pills.
So yeah, use a backup method for sure until next week.

(and any "skip a period" style pill is a monophasic, the active pills are all the same. you can actually use any monophasic pill to skip your period, not just the ones marketed as such. It doesn't work with triphasic since the hormones are different from week to week.)

If you often miss pills you might want to look into an alternate method, like the patch or the ring. I forgot my pills ALL the time when I was on them, I'm much less paranoid since switching to the ring since I only need to remember it once a month, and the timeframe is less strict.
posted by Kellydamnit at 3:59 PM on December 22, 2007