- If you're gonna hide anything anywhere,
anywhere on around your vagina when you have your period
is a solid spot.
- Hi, I'm Jordan and today I'm gonna be telling you
my tampon horror story.
To set the scene, I was nine years old,
which is pretty young.
Lo and behold I go to put my swimsuit on as i'm nine
and splat, there's my period.
I had heard about it, I'd heard about the mythical creature
called T.O.M. but I didn't think was going to come.
And I actually decided to hide it from my parents.
Legitimate months go by and I still have not admitted
to anyone, including my mother, that I started my period.
I came up on my fourth grade field day,
and I had somehow smuggled pads up until that point.
But I decided that if I'm going to run the 300 meter race,
I don't want to have a squelchy pad.
So, I found a tampon in my schools bathroom,
and I decided this is it, ladies and gentlemen,
I am going to graduate from a pad and use a tampon,
and I'm nine years old and it's field day
and I'm going to win this race.
So I go into the bathroom, and I have no idea
what's going on.
And if you can imagine a free tampon
at a Lutheran elementary school.
It of course is a cardboard tampon.
I pull it out I'm like oh my god this is so scary,
I don't know what to do, back then too
we didn't have phones, or anything these kids have.
So there's no instructions, I just went for it.
I think when I realized I walked out of that bathroom
and this might be really TMI but here we are.
I could feel it sticking out of my underwear.
And I just knew I was like, I don't think this is right,
but I'm nine years old I don't really know what a tampon is,
never really been down there so we'll just go with it.
I realized I completely inserted the tampon
applicator and all, and then I ran around all day
for field day with the applicator still in.
So as you can imagine, super uncomfortable.
I thought I did it right, I was like whoa tampons,
don't understand why everyone uses this instead of a pad.
This is not more athletic.
This is not more comfortable.
I would like to think that I won the race, I have no idea.
Let's say that I won the race, because I finally decided
as a nine year old to wear a frickin tampon
instead of a pad.
And I finally admitted to my mom I started my period,
so she could actually help me learn how to use a tampon
for further athletic endeavors.
Now that I'm actually talking through this
it's like, oh, like
pads would randomly just kind of show up
and I could use them and it's like I was nine, like,
there's no way I went to the store and bought them.
And like, it's starting to all kind of like
figure itself out that my mom knew.
She just didn't want to out me
and like embarrass me probably because
she's a really good mom.
- Hi, my name is Connie and today I'm going to tell you
a tampon horror story.
Not really mine, but my best friends.
And I'm very sorry.
It's the ninth grade, we're women now.
We're high schoolers, we know what's up, everything's great.
I happen to have most of my classes with my best friend,
which, as everybody knows is like hitting the jackpot.
We're already like so excited,
nothing can possibly go wrong this year.
So it was just like any other day, we're on AB schedule,
I believe it was A block.
It's our math class, not a huge fan of math,
I'm already kind of like zoning out.
I see my friend, she's in the desk next to me,
so I see her get up and she goes, and she gets a hall pass
and she goes to leave.
I don't think anything of it.
I'm just gonna try to come up with a name to give her.
I literally could only think of the name Frank.
That's like the most horrible.
Hold up, no, I can do this, I can think of a girl name.
- [Camerawoman] How about Jessica?
- Jessica, Jessica Jessica Jessica,
that is what we will call her.
Jessica gets up, she goes out of the classroom,
don't really think much about it, I just keep working.
All sudden I hear the door open again
so I look up Jessica's face is paler than a ghost.
She looks as if she has seen something truly horrible.
She kind of like crouches down next to my desk
and she's like "Connie, Connie, Connie, Connie."
"I need your help."
I'm already in like problem solving mode.
Best friend, issue, crisis, I'm there
we're going to figure it out.
So I go up to my teacher, they let us both
take hall passes together, which why,
you should never let friends do that,
but they totally let us.
So we go to the bathroom.
She goes, and she starts checking under the stalls
to see if anybody's there.
She pulls me in with her to the large, the handicap stalls
and she shuts the door and she goes,
"It broke."
And I go, "What broke?"
"The string, the string on my tampon broke."
"And I don't know how to get it out."
This is one of her first times putting in a tampon.
We're like ninth grade and we thought we knew everything,
we do not know everything we don't know anything.
So in our little ninth grade brains,
we think that's going to be stuck up there forever
and Jessica is going to die.
Jessica's panicking, I'm now panicking,
and she looks me in the eyes and she says,
"You have to help me."
And that's when I said,
"Jessica, put your foot up on that toilet"
"and put your other foot on the ground,"
"we're going to get that thing out of you."
She's so panicked, that of course
she can't like get anything to come out.
So I was like, Jessica look in my eyes, look at my eyes.
Breathe with me, so we took some like calming breaths,
and I was like, if push comes to shove,
I'm going to reach up in there
and I'm going to get that thing out of you.
I'm your best friend and I will do this for you.
So now we're going to like push, because that was our plan
and we're like okay maybe if we like push.
She starts to push, and she's like, "You have to look."
And I'm like, okay, here we go.
Our friendship is at a new level.
This is what is now happening.
So I look and I can see that it's right there,
and there's like still a little bit of the string.
It was like a holy grail, there like (singing operatically),
she is open and there is a string there.
"Jessica, there's a string!"
I was like, "There's a string we can get it out!"
"We can get it out."
And she's like, "Are you serious, are you serious?"
So she looks down, and she manages to grab it
and yank it out, and we survived.
So that's how I say my friends life,
also why I only use pads, because that really terrified me.
Hi I'm Merle, and today I'm going to tell you
a tampon horror story.
So my tampon story is not necessarily my story,
but it is my grandmother's, and it is
much more interesting than anything
that's ever happened to me with a tampon.
My grandmother, Sandy, was just this incredibly powerful
beautiful strong woman.
She was a model back in her day, it's legit, she was legit.
She used to like beat men off with a baseball bat.
She was always telling me and my cousin all of these stories
about men that will become obsessed with her.
And I'm like now I know where I got it.
She has stories of men scaling buildings for her,
like screaming outside of her apartment for her,
showing up in the middle of other dates
and throwing money on the table.
She's got all these crazy, crazy, crazy stories.
Anyway, she was dating this royalty in Spain,
she didn't give me specifics but we don't really need them,
you get the picture.
He saw her like by a fountain, and he was like "You."
"You."
I think that's probably all he said, and she was like,
"Sure."
She went along with him.
He would buy her lavish jewelry and clothes,
and they went on all these magnificent trips.
She got to see parts of the world she would have never seen,
she didn't come from a lot of money.
Of all of the things that he gave her, she loved this ring.
She loved love love love love this one ring.
She thought it was beautiful, and she cherished it.
So they dated for a year, but you know,
as some of these bigger relationships
that are really passionate at the start,
they tend to go out and burning flames.
This man was furious at her,
he thought that she was cheating on him,
she might have been cheating on him, I don't know.
Either way, he was so mad at her,
he ended up chasing her out of his palace,
grabbing the necklace off her, throws the pearls
spilling all over the courtyard.
He grabs like the shawl he got her, he rips it in half.
He's like, "I'm gonna take every last thing"
"I've ever gave to you, you can't, you don't deserve it."
So he chases her to this bridge, right?
Cuz there's a bridge in the palace, and the terrace,
and the moat, like what?
I don't know.
This isn't how my life is, but like
I gotta work on some things.
So anyway, this guy's on this bridge with her and he's like,
"Give me the earrings, give me the necklace."
He's taking the stuff off, and then the like tiara,
I've made that part up but I feel like
she must have had a tiara.
She's like I know he's gonna want this ring.
She doesn't want to remember this man,
this man's probably a madman.
And so she's like, I'm okay with getting rid of all my stuff
but not this ring, not this ring that she's loved so much.
She, it's her favorite piece of jewelry.
So what did she do?
I mean, what any of us would have done.
She tied it to a tampon string.
Because he's not gonna look there,
anyway so she tied it to her tampon string,
the thing is like, I don't need to illustrate that for you.
The guy comes up to her he's like
convinced he's got everything off of her.
And, yeah, she got to keep the ring,
and you know what, who would who inherited that ring?
Me.
This is the ring that was tied
to my grandmothers tampon string.
And I could not be more proud to wear it, so,
thanks grandma.
(upbeat music)