We women are very susceptible to environmental and health changes. A bad cold or the flu may be enough to throw your period off that month or change the duration and arrival of your period and influence your cycle in general.  

If you’ve caught a cold before your period is about to arrive, it may come later than your MIA calendar tells you, and it is normal in this case for it to be late.

A cold can even affect the duration and severeness of your PMS. If you’re healthy, your premenstrual symptoms show up and then decrease as your period starts, but if you’ve caught a cold, your PMS may progress in severity and duration, you may stay fatigued, irritated or sleepy for longer than usual. Intoxication may also trigger breast tenderness and prolong the PMS associated issues with your digestive tract, such as diarrhea or constipation.

If you’re sick here are some other symptoms that may change because of your current condition:

• You may have spotting bloody discharge before the start of your period and afterward. This is because the flu influences your hormones, which in turn directly change your menstrual patterns. This alteration in hormone levels may affect the endometrium, so it may shed the lining in a different pattern.

• Duration. Your period may last a little longer than usual if you’ve got a cold.

• Volume of discharge. If you’re sick, the volume of your bleeding may be different from what you usually have and you may notice larger blood clots too. Additionally, the discharge color may also seem to be darker. This happens due to temperature fluctuations. If you have a fever, your blood’s viscosity increases too, so it gets clotted even before leaving the vagina, which is why the discharge color may be dark brown.  

• Cramping. You may experience more severe menstrual cramps if you are sick and on your period. Intoxication due to illness influences the nerve pathways in your body, so that’s why you may be more sensitive to contractions in your womb and thus feel more pain than usual.

Get better and keep logging your data with the MIA app to learn more about what’s going on with your body during the various phases of your menstrual cycle. Make sure you alert your doctor if your period is consistently irregular.