Scarleteen

I’m new to this board, but I’ve came here multiple times, being a pro-over thinker with everything related to being sexually active.

Hello,

Here’s the breakdown of my story. I’ve been on the pill for almost two years, and I take it perfectly, same time everyday with no misses and I use condoms perfectly on top of that because I’m freshly 19 and in college, not the best time for a baby. Anyways, yesterday evening, I took my birth control pill (I take trinessa 28 combination pills) at 4:00 PM as always. It was my last pill of my current pack before starting the pill-free week. I ate something really bad for dinner, lots of grease and just not a good time, and ended up getting sick and throwing up at 7:50 PM, 10 minutes away from being 4 hours after taking my birth control. On the pamphlet, it says that, if you throw up within 3-4 hours of taking your pill to take the next one in the pack, but that was my last pill. I also find it hard to believe that 4 hours isn’t enough to absorb that tiny little thing that begins dissolving as soon as it touches my tongue. 3 hours and 50 minutes after taking it, I vomited. And I’m scared because I just assumed it was already absorbed and had sex (With a condom, no breakage or leakage everything was good). But now, I just started my first day of the pill free week, and I’m concerned if my protection is compromised and if I can still have sex during this time due to what happened last night. Any help would be appreciated.

In this case, your next pill would be your placebo pill, so it's all good regardless. (There's always a next pill, they just aren't always active pills.)

But you also back up with condoms, which is great for a bunch of reasons, including that it provides you extra protection in the case you need it for things like this anyhow.

Okay. I should’ve elaborated more, it means when you throw up within 3-4 hours of taking your pill, you have to follow up by taking the next active pill in your pack, but I had no other active pills left, unfortunately. Should I be worried? And should I not have sex, even if I do use condoms, during the pill-free week that I started today?

Also, thanks for the quick reply!

I understand. Like I said, there is always an extra pill, sometimes it just isn't an active pill. Your "next pill" was a placebo pill, whether you take those pills or not.

I can't speak to the worry/pregnancy scare part of this coming up because that's outside our service policies.

I also can't tell you what to do moving forward in terms of how you feel about having intercourse with condoms when you're not sure if you have the full effectiveness your pill provides (even though you probably do, since even if you had missed that one last active pill, it was just the one and was also a last one, rather than a first). Only you can figure that one out for yourself: I'd suggest you do whatever it is you feel best about and right with.

Ok thanks

I’m just a little bit confused, sorry to be annoying. I’m new to this board asking thing, and I saw that good advice is given from the forums I’ve read before making my post. I wasn’t asking for reassurance by any means, but I just wanted to know if my pill would’ve been absorbed after 3 hours and 50 minutes, or if it wouldn’t have been.

We just can't possibly tell you that. We all don't have the same metabolisms or digestive systems, for one, but also that's just not something we could know happened in any given time period or not. It's impossible, I'm afraid.

The information about your pill and vomiting from the manufacturer says what it does for a reason, based on research and study. So, the window they give around that is a realistic window for pill metabolism, and information we'd consider reliable.