period misses. period

I hate when going through my patients' history, i ask them about their age of menarche--how old they were when they first got their period--and they don't remember. how do you not remember when you first got your period??! I don't mean like an exact date, but at least some ball park of an age. don't we all remember that first time? you told your mom, maybe she told your dad and you got mad at her? you had to find a pad, maybe had to ask your friend, or your friend's mom if you were somewhere not home? maybe you even freaked out a little bit? don't you remember, approximately, when that was? 7th grade because you were best friends with this person? or sixth grade because you had this person as your homeroom teacher and needed to get an excuse to go to the bathroom? Haven't we all read 'seventeen' as youths and were mortified over those 'most embarrassing moment' columns, hoping you won't get your first period while at a pool party, or while wearing that perfectly white uniform???? and when it did happen, don't we remember?
I also hate that my patients, when they, for some reason, don't remember their age, make up a number that is excessively too old. just to be clear, getting your period as a junior in high school, or after you've declared your college major, is not normal. so unless you were a super athlete and trained with symone biles, i hope your parents took you to a specialist to be evaluated for some hormonal imbalance, or a missing X chromosome. otherwise, you're just wrong.
same with age at first intercourse. i get it, the first time is frequently not great..and sometimes the second, and the third, and the 27th. maybe we wish we could forget, take it back, rearrange some things about it. maybe it was awkward, painful, even violent and unwelcome. but i feel like everyone should remember. those kinds of milestones in life are not the things one forgets. like you remember your first kiss, the first time you fell in love and felt it, the first time your heart was broken. which makes me wonder if people are just ashamed to tell me, their doctor, or they truly are weird and don't pay attention. i think it's conceivable that one would forget when or whether one had chlamydia (v gonorrhea), but losing one's virginity should, in theory, be harder to forget.
i hate that term. no one loses their virginity. you know exactly where your virginity went. it's not like you woke up one day and was like, shit! where did it go?? i had it yesterday, but now i can't find it! no, no one loses their virginity. it is given away, traded, sometimes taken, but never lost. i wish the same could be said about time wasted, time spent in bad relationships, about energy given to people who didn't deserve it, emotions spent on things and people who were not worth it. those are the things we should try to forget, not our first periods!