Brown Spotting instead of Period is Normal! Don’t Freak Out!

Hi!

I recently went through a pregnancy scare that totally shook me to my core. I have huge pregnancy anxiety, so I symptom spotted and spotted until I was thoroughly convinced I was pregnant. Then, of course, I had light brown spotting instead of an actual period for four days.

Paranoid me, I googled the symptoms and came across those dreaded words in this sub “implantation bleeding.” As you’ll hear from many people in this sub, this phrase should be erased from the internet as it is mainly used in retrospect by women trying to conceive.

I just wanted to make a post talking about my experience, in hopes that someone searching for posts about brown spotting in a panic can find this to calm them down before they end up weeks into a pregnancy forum, fully convinced they’re the next Virgin Mary. (Hint: that was me, just like a week ago lol).

In my case, I ended up taking early detection HPT after HPT, completely convinced each morning that this would be the day the hCG levels would be high enough to show a positive. I ended up taking these until 21 days past the last time I had any sexual activity, all of them were negative. But I wasn’t convinced! I was certain I was still testing too early. Three days after the spotting stopped, I went to the hospital to get a quantitative beta HCG blood test. For those of you new to this, these tests check to see if your hCG is higher than 5 mIU/mL. Blood hCG concentrations are higher than urine, and early detection urine tests check at the 20-25 mIU/mL range. Anyway, by 4-5 days after implantation, blood tests should show an hCG count of around 25 mIU/mL or higher. After two nerve wracking hours waiting for lab results, I found out my hCG count: less than 0.1 mIU/mL. AKA, I’m hella not pregnant.

Here’s the basic point: brown spotting is totally normal, it can be caused by a ton of reasons, including sickness and stress. However, if you’re like me, that’s not enough to convince me, and the Internet doesn’t offer enough resources explaining where brown spotting comes from if it’s not pregnancy related.

In my case, it was likely birth control related in addition to sickness and stress. I have a family member that works for a well-known BC brand, and this is the answer she received from their in-house RN:

It is totally normal to have only brown spotting when you’ve normally had full periods. Brown discharge is just old blood. BC works by thinning out and shedding the uterine lining during your periods. It’s likely you had way heavier periods when you started BC and they’ve gradually gotten lighter. This is normal. When you shed most of the lining, eventually there isn’t really much to shed anymore. Thus, it’s totally normal for women on BC to have lighter and shorter periods, and even occasionally have brown spotting instead of a period, even if it’s unusual for them.

Thought I’d pass on the message. Apparently, BC companies get calls from people freaking out about brown spotting instead of a period all the time and this is what they usually tell them.

Tl;dr: Get off google! There’s way too much posts from people trying to get pregnant that oversaturates information on why it’s totally normal to have brown spotting instead of period. Don’t symptom spot, take a test! If you’re really stressed out, take a blood test.