e-mail
Ever have one of those experiences where some word, place or idea just keeps popping up in front of your face, making it impossible to ignore and lending itself some gravitas (most likely undeserved, but palpable, nonetheless) that gains strength
with every appearance?
That’s me today.
Cruising around the Internet in my normal morning routine of checking news, catching up with friends and family and gathering blog fodder, the same blasted message kept blurting itself:
How is menopause affecting you?
All right, already! I’ll think about this for a minute.
Like just about everything else health related with me … either all or nothing, sick as a dog or healthy as a horse, fit as a fiddle or falling apart … menopause hit me early, and hit me hard.
I was forty-two when informed that I was beginning “The Change”, and actually brightened with the news. “Oh, goodie,” I thought. “No more cramps.”
Ha! Little did I know.
Ten years! It took me ten years to finish with this natural phase of womanhood. Lucky me.
I tried to go natural, to suck it up and not be a wimp, to pamper myself with infusions and spa treatments and herbal remedies. Let’s just say I wasn’t successful. Nothing worked.
Not only was I grumpy, cranky, crampy and messy (that’s four out of seven dwarves right there) I also had hot flashes on the half hour … hot flashes that could make me scream. I could feel them come on with a slight tingle at the base of my skull. Within seconds, the whole back of my neck and scalp would develop an extremely painful sensation — like having a needle sticking into every one of my pores. Next, I would go bright red and break out in an immediate and heavy (not to mention, oh so very attractive) sweat as the needle-digging-into-pore feeling moved down the middle of my back. This would last three to five minutes, then repeat in thirty minutes.
So, HRT, there I came!
It took a bit of tinkering to get things right, but the relief was almost instant. I took my little pills faithfully for a number of years, stopped once only to find myself right back to the screaming sweats, then again for a while.
I’m now artificial-hormone free, and at fifty-four am done changing. My fibroids and endometrial tissues have shrunken down to nothing and my months pass without me charting their path with headaches and cramps.
I’ve lost nothing in the process, thankfully. My bones, like the rest of me, are still dense, and all my bits work and still enjoy themselves.
So, to answer the question that’s been coming at me all morning, menopause is affecting me just fine, now, thank you.
My friend, Ann, is in the throes of menopause. This poor woman doesn’t have hot flashes… she’s living in hell. No amount of funeral-home-fans can keep her cool, and wherever she goes, she leaves a trail of damp kleenexes. They just fall out of her sleeves, pockets, or wherever she has tucked them after mopping up.
Until she was introduced to Premarin, my friend, Pat, was the AMA’s choice for schizophrenic of the year. A real poster child. We never knew which personality would be in control.
Cindy’s husband spent one winter camped out in their storage room because she was such a treasure to live with. Buried treasure. Preferably several feet down in the garden.
If being a human torch with unpredictable mood swings and general witchiness are symptoms of menopause, honey, I’m a medical miracle. I have been in menopause since I was six.