When she was 16, Marjolein Robertson had a period that stopped and started, stopped and started again, then didn’t stop.
“It picked up in pace and volume for days and days,” she says. “I remember talking to my friends about it, but we were all clueless. I was changing my pad and my tampon every half-hour but I still thought: ‘It’s OK, it going to stop eventually.’ In my head, it was a sac of blood. It can only have so much volume.”
Her higher-English exam was approaching. Her mother said they’d get that out of the way then see a doctor – but on the night before the exam, the bleeding was too much. Her mum took her to their local hospital on Shetland.
“She thought they could give me something to stop the bleeding, then we’d go home so I could do my exam,” says Robertson. “We walked in, the doctor and nurse asked: ‘What’s wrong?’ and I started crying, saying I was having ‘a really bad period’. I think that was the first time I’d talked about it to a stranger.”
The medics rolled their eyes a little. The doctor took Robertson’s bloods, while the nurse chatted about horrible periods and wearing two pairs of pants – but when the doctor returned, his demeanour had changed.
“He was speaking really fast and in jargon,” says Robertson, “and I didn’t understand, but my mam understood and said: ‘No, she’s coming home with me. She has her English exam tomorrow.’ The doctor said: ‘If you take her home now, she won’t live through the night.’”
Robertson stayed in hospital for three days and had two blood transfusions. “I was meant to have a third but there were only so many blood banks in Shetland,” she says. When she was discharged, her blood back at healthy levels, Robertson asked what had happened. The doctors didn’t know.
Now – 18 years later – Robertson is a comedian and, in her new solo show, she relives this episode. At this point of the story she tells the audience that luckily she didn’t require a diagnosis. That, luckily, the NHS had a magical solution, something that works for any woman whose periods are heavy or painful or irregular – even life threatening. “Say it with me, ladies!” she says on stage. The women chorus: “The pill.” (“It’s interesting,” says Robertson. “It’s more of a collective groan – never a good cheer.”)
The show, O, which will run at the Edinburgh festival fringe this summer, opens with a stunt. It’s bloody and gory and aims to shine a light on the state of women’s healthcare in the UK. Robertson – a finalist in the BBC New Comedy awards and winner of Scots Speaker of the Year in 2022 – is well aware this is not a sexy subject. (“Oh no, is this another female comedian talking about periods?” she asks midway through.)
On the face of it, the years Robertson has spent living with brutal, agonising periods, trying and failing to find answers since the haemorrhage that could have killed her, makes for equally unlikely comedy. Initially, on leaving the hospital, she was put on Depo-Provera, the contraceptive injection, even though it’s not recommended as a first-line treatment before the age of 19 because of the risk to bone density – something 16-year-old Robertson wasn’t told.
“It was an injection every 12 weeks in my bum,” she says. “I had it from the age of 16 to 26. It flattened me, made me just so sad. Every three months, after the injection, I’d be lying in the dark, not bothering to turn the light on, thinking: ‘What’s the point in getting up today?’ I had no sex drive – but I’d started taking it in the turmoil of puberty when you don’t know what’s normal. You don’t know who you are or what your emotions might be like.”
After Depo-Provera, Robertson tried other solutions. “I had the implant, the pill and the coil,” she says. “But even with all these, my bleeding eventually came back. Sometimes it was normal. Other times, it was so heavy I’d faint. It could be so bad that I’d be bedridden for three or four days at time. I’ve had to pull out of gigs because the only thing I can do is lie very still. If I was active, if I went for a run or did some yoga when a period had ended, it would come back for another five days.”
And then there was the pain. “There have been times when, even if I take two paracetamol and two ibuprofen, I can’t sleep – I just cry all night. And I know I have a high pain threshold; I broke my toe once and didn’t realise! My Thai boxing instructor had to tell me to stop kicking and go home.”
Robertson went to her doctor, went to different doctors, many times. “I was always asking for help,” she says. “I’d say, I want to know why my periods are so bad. I’d want to know what was wrong with me, but I’d just be told: ‘Periods can be like this.’ It made me feel I was wasting their time.” She was about 30 when her best friend told her: “I’ve found the password! I know how to get proper treatment. Tell your doctor that you’re trying for a baby.”
So Robertson did. “The doctor literally said: ‘Lets get to the bottom of this, then,’” says Robertson. “No one wanted to get to the bottom of why, every month, I was debilitated and in pain. Now that I wanted a baby, I was given an internal scan. I got to see a gynaecologist. All these things finally happened.” As a result, Robertson was diagnosed with adenomyosis – a condition that might affect as many as one in 10 women. (Last year, BBC presenter Naga Munchetty described its devastating impact on her life, saying she’d been “failed and gaslit” by the NHS.)
“Adenomyosis is when the womb lining over-enthusiastically stitches right into the muscular wall of the womb, so when you have a period and shed the lining, the muscles have to tear open and you can start to suffer internal bleeding,” says Robertson. “If it doesn’t heal itself, that’s when you start to haemorrhage.”
O is the second in a trilogy, and follows Marj, Robertson’s sell-out Edinburgh show last year, which won her two award nominations. Both are surreal in parts, weaving darkness with light, combining straight standup with Shetland folklore and personal stories, weird and wild, of life on a Shetland croft. For Robertson, they are a natural extension of the world she grew up in. “It’s the power of a good story,” she says. “Shetland had so many arts nights and festivals where everyone would perform a sketch. Whenever there was any event, there’d be jokes or funny talks and a coming together to laugh.”
After finishing school, she studied archaeology at Edinburgh, before moving to Amsterdam where she took a standup comedy course. (She’s now based in Edinburgh.) “I found that what I loved most was having time in a show to share a whole folktale, to teach people something and take them to a place that’s maybe uncomfortable, before taking them back, and making them laugh again. Even in the darkest moments, when you’re going through the most horrible things, you can say something to make everyone burst out laughing. That’s cathartic and so powerful.”
In Marj, Robertson told the Shetland folktale of the Selkie wife, part-seal, part-human, who is confined to land after losing her seal skin while dancing on the beach. She falls in love with a fisherman, marries him and has children who, years later, find her seal skin buried at the bottom of their father’s fishing chest. “At first, she’s overjoyed, but then she realises what her husband did to her,” says Robertson. “He’d stolen her true self and hidden it so she had no option but to stay with him. He was her captor.” In the show, when she reaches this point, Robertson pulls back to her own life to reveal that she was in an abusive relationship and didn’t know for a long time because it was coercive, because of the gaslighting – and the laughter would slow right down.
Similarly, in O, Robertson tells the folklore Shetlanders once used to explain the seasons – the battles between the Sea Midder, mother of the sea, and Teran, the spirit of winter. She points out that science has come a very long way since then – but when it comes to women’s menstrual health? Maybe not so much.
For Robertson, there has been no good solution for her adenomyosis – which is why she is still working on the final section of her show, still writing it, looking for some light. The most effective treatment is a hysterectomy, another is an ablation, and both carry considerations such as early “crash” menopause or infertility. She’s currently on “incredibly strong painkillers” and tranexamic acid to reduce the bleeding. “But at the works-in-progress, women in the audience with adenomyosis have told me they needed so much tranexamic acid that they’re now experiencing side-effects,” says Robertson. “Both my parents are on blood thinners, so I’m not comfortable taking a clotting medication long-term.” She’s also experimenting with lifestyle changes, quitting alcohol, exercising to strengthen her core, to see if anything helps.
She hopes to stir up some rage. “At the end of Marj, I always stood outside in case anyone leaving wanted to speak about it,” she says. “Every day, at least one person would come and say: ‘I’ve been there.’” She remembers one 19-year-old who approached in tears, hugged her, then quickly left. “She was there with her mam,” says Robertson. “A few days later, her mam contacted me to say that she’d been in an abusive relationship with her daughter’s stepfather for years and her daughter had left home as soon as she’d been able to. Now they were slowly trying to rekindle their relationship and they picked my show at random with no idea what it was about. At the end, the daughter had turned to her mam and said: ‘Now I understand why you didn’t leave him.’” Robertson wells up suddenly and has to pause. “Sorry, I don’t know why I get so upset,” she says, half laughing. “But that was why I wrote the show.
“I probably won’t be standing at the door at the end of O – there’s too much fake blood to clear up,” she continues. “I don’t expect it to be as emotional as Marj – but a lot of us have been bleeding far too much, and in pain for far too long. Something has to change.”
Marjolein Robertson: O is at the Edinburgh festival fringe, at the Monkey Barrel (the Hive), from 30 July to 25 August
