The average woman has four hundred to five hundred menstrual cycles in her lifetime, each one lasting four to seven days. If you add them all up, it comes out to more than nine years—a long time for women who suffer premenstrual syndrome (PMS). “You can’t be bitchy and agitated and short-tempered and have a decent life,” says a thirty-eight-year-old colleague I’ll call Patty. “I know the feminists hate it when you say this, but some of us do go crazy.”
