Am i a perfect bcp user?

[dakota1]

I've been taking the pills for two months and 10 days now, haven't missed any. However, i have the alarm set for 10:00 pm, but i often take them at 11:00 or 12:00 cause i forget to take them. I am also taking oral medication for acne but i got it prescripted along with my bcp by my gynecologist. Am i a perfect user or a typical user? I want to know because of the effectiveness rate

[Redskies]

It sounds like you're taking your pill correctly. A difference of an hour or two won't have any impact on its effectiveness.

It's unrealistic for anyone to think they'll have the perfect use effectiveness rate for a user-controlled method like the pill, because that'd mean not making a single mistake over a whole year. That's too much for any of us to expect of ourselves! You've only been taking the pill for a couple of months, so you don't yet know what your pill-taking will look like over a whole a year because that's not happened yet.

Typical use includes and accounts for things like sometimes missing a pill. So, if you continued taking your pill the way you have been - reliably and the way you're supposed to take it - you could probably figure that your own likely effectiveness would be somewhere between the typical and perfect rates.

If that doesn't feel like enough for you to feel comfortable and secure, what would likely be a better plan is to also use a back-up method. Using two methods together correctly will automatically give you a very high level of protection, and give you the peace of mind that if you ever make a mistake with one, you'll still be covered by the other. If you want to see what can be teamed up with the pill and what those numbers are, we've got it in The Buddy System: Effectiveness Rates for Backing Up Your Birth Control With a Second Method