From 10 Ways Perimenopause Is Destroying My Life – The Mid.
1. My Period Is Trying to Kill Me
For years, I enjoyed a regular and uneventful menstrual cycle. Now, I never know when I’m going to get my period. It could be in the next six weeks causing a panicked pregnancy scare, or it could decide to come every two weeks (and always when I’m not expecting it at all, and wearing white pants). How long it will last is also a mystery. Once, I had my period for two days, and another time it lasted a full 12. Cramps, heavy bleeding—I’ve got all that in perimenopause. Last month, I passed something that resembled a London broil. It was as if my entire uterus was trying to escape through my vagina. I don’t like this. I want the boring periods I experienced in my 20s back.
2. I Can’t Sleep
Every day I tell myself that this will be the night that I will go to bed at a decent hour and get a full night’s sleep, but it never happens. My sleep patterns now resemble a newborn’s. I’m up every two hours. I’m hungry, I have to pee, I’m bored. I’ll toss and turn for hours each night, praying that my mind will shut off and let me go to sleep, but nope. Naturally, because of this, I’m exhausted all day long and have to drink a ton of coffee to stay awake. To further torture me, in the past year, my body has decided it doesn’t want to metabolize caffeine like it once used to. I’ve morphed into a hybrid of Lady Macbeth and Cornholio. If you ever see me furiously Irish step-dancing through the aisles of Walmart, I swear it’s not meth. I just had a cup of coffee, because I was tired, because I can’t sleep at night, because of perimenopause. Save me, please.
3. Unexplained Weight Gain
No, I’m not pregnant. I’m just cruelly bloated. They make mom jeans for women like me. Once a sworn enemy, elastic is now my greatest ally. I swear, I haven’t changed my diet at all. If anything, I eat healthier now than ever, but my metabolism is nonexistent these days. I used to be able to rip through nachos, Twix bars and Slurpees, and remain a size four, but now a single Cheeto will force me into a higher dress size.
4. My Body Is Growing Weird Hairs
I hate my teenage self who used to wonder why older ladies always had wiry hair on their chins. Now I know. It’s because those hairs can randomly sprout three inches in about two seconds. And also because we are so old that we can’t even see black whiskers shooting out of our faces. Yes, I’ve accepted it, I’m either turning into Witch Hazel from Looney Tunes, or a walrus.
And when I cough, laugh, or jump up and down. I’m an old house—quaint and charming on the outside, but my plumbing system is a leaky nightmare.
PMS is apparently having its last hurrah with me and is determined to go out with a bang. Irritable doesn’t begin to describe it. Little things set me off: going to IKEA, wanting tortilla chips but being out of them, if my daughter whines because, God forbid, I gave her the wrong plate at lunch, and when my clock ticks too loudly in the middle of the night. It’s awful. Whenever I see a woman on the news who’s had a road rage incident, I sigh knowingly and say that I bet she’s in perimenopause. Sometimes I have fantasies of getting a job at an amusement park haunted house just so I can chase people around with a chainsaw, because most of the time, that’s what I feel like doing anyway. I may as well get paid for it, right?
7. My Skin Is Freaking Me Out
I’m so dry and wrinkly that I think my vagina has cobwebs. I recently read somewhere that during perimenopause “breast tissue may reduce.” Great. That thing sputtering around the room? Not a deflating balloon. That’s my left boob. The skin on my arms and chest is so crepe-y that you could make streamers out of me. Yay! I love looking like a beige party decoration. I found an age spot on my hand the other day, and I also heard that you can get age spots on your nether regions, which is fabulous because I always wanted my crotch to look like a Chinese crested puppy. Said no woman ever.
8. I Can’t Remember Anything
What was I saying? You know that feeling when you’re trying to remember something, and it’s right on the tip of your tongue? That’s me 24/7 these days. They call this brain fog, and I feel like I’ve reached my brain’s natural storage capacity and now it’s malfunctioning from overload. I need an external hard drive for my mind. The number of times in a day when I find myself standing in the middle of a room and have no idea how I got there or what I’m supposed to be doing is staggering. Every time I open an app on my phone, I forget what I meant to look up, log or check. I’ve officially turned into the guy from Memento and am going to have to start writing notes on my skin to piece together my life.
9. Everything Makes Me Cry
Last week, I cried because I saw a high school marching band coming down the street playing Stevie Wonder. I cried at a puppet show, from watching children ride a carousel and over the grand finale of a fireworks display. Forget Idina Menzel. Before she even opens her mouth to sing, I’m weeping uncontrollably.
10. I’m Hot—NO, I’m Freezing
My internal temperature gauge has gone haywire. I wear cardigans in the summer, and bathing suits in the snow. Nothing makes sense anymore.
But that’s the nature of perimenopause—everything is different, it’s confusing, and most women don’t know what to expect. Now that I know I’m not insane, that this stuff is pretty normal, and that I’m not dying from a terrible illness that causes insomnia, vaginal dryness and ugly boobs, I can usually laugh off my symptoms. When I’m not hysterically sobbing, that is. Perimenopause is a sucky part of life, like puberty was, and when it’s over, the very second my last period ends, I’m throwing a huge party. Or, more than likely, just going to bed.
“I repeat over and over on the site that any complaints a woman has during menopause should not automatically be attributed to the process of menopause. That’s an important disclaimer. In short, before assuming, not that you are, that any of the things you’ve mentioned in your message are associated with peri or postmenopause, you should be checked by a doctor you respect, trust and admire — one who listens to you and doesn’t just hand you a prescription to resolve your problems.
That having been said, let me tell you that during those “worst” years of perimenopause, I experienced SO MANY strange, inexplicable and, oftentimes, bizarre feelings in my body, I conjured up notions of having a brain tumor, Parkinson’s Disease, Lupus, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Menniere’s Disease, a heart condition, paralysis, a potential stroke, glaucoma — have I left anything out? And I say none of this with humor.
Perimenopause is the singularly most uncomfortable time of a woman’s life. I’ve posted many times about the internal shaking. It’s been my nemesis and continues this day to plague me.
I had the facial tremors and buzzing sensations on a daily basis. The feelings were so strange, they almost defy description. No one could see it, but it felt as though I were having a stroke. I’d often experience numbness in my face and on my left side at the same time — a red flag would go up because I thought I was definitely having a coronary situation or stroke. Facial ticks, facial tremors, an electrical buzzing in the back of my neck and various parts of my body drove me to distraction.
The good part about this story is that most of those symptoms DO go away once you’ve been without a period for about a year or two. Those feelings, in the majority of cases, are due to the hormonal fluctuations your body is experiencing. Imagine turning the thermostat in your house up and down a dozen or more times a day. Your house wouldn’t know whether to turn on the heat or air conditioning.
Our bodies become very sensitized during this process. Feelings are frightening — we can walk around for days feeling vertigo/dizziness and/or a ringing in the ears (tinnitus). There were days I had to grab onto a bannister or railing for fear that I was going to fall over. My legs still pose a problem — becoming weak and feeling as if they’re not going to support me any longer. Pain in the feet, calves, shoulders, joints aching and paining often to the point of bringing tears to your eyes.
My suggestion to you would be to get yourself a thorough examination by your doctor. Have a blood workup, sugar test, thyroid, hormone levels, total lipid / cholesterol profile. Insist on an Echo cardiogram, not just a cardiogram.
Our bodies are composed of so many different types of hormones — not just estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Our bodies react to the constant ebb and flow of these hormone levels. Our central nervous system, nerve endings produce electrical impulses. Those electrical impulses are felt differently by every woman. Some women never feel them, while others are fraught with all sorts of strange sensations.
Once you’ve been given a clean bill of health by your doctor, the singularly most important thing you need to do during perimenopause is do relaxation techniques. Learn breathing exercises. Use the paper bag method (I call it “brown bagging it) I have described in many areas of the Web site and on these boards. I’ll provide a link to that at the end of this message.
Feed yourself affirmations every day that this, too, shall pass — that you are not dying — that although you feel as if your body is going to hell in a handbasket and you’re never going to survive this transition, you will. That, most importantly, there is nothing to be afraid of even though it feels at times like someone is holding a gun to your head and ready to pull the trigger.
Oh, Lord, would it were so that they’d find a way for women NOT to have to go through menopause. And, further, I am sick of hearing *some* people say that it’s all in our minds, or it’s our nerves, or if we had better things to do with our time, we wouldn’t think about it. I’ve never stopped being busy during this transition, but that didn’t ease the symptoms.
To those people, I say … until you’ve walked a mile in another person’s shoes, you can’t know what they are going through. Women in menopause aren’t hypochondriacs. I have to be dragged and feeling as if I’m not long for the world before I go to the doctor. Why? Because during perimenopause, I have learned… doctors don’t have answers to most of our questions other than to prescribe tranquilizers or anti-depressants or hormones…. and although some of these medications may help in the short term and to get you over the “hump” of perimenopause, most of them don’t work in the long term — or through the duration of perimenopause and it concerns me that there are no real long-term studies on these SSRI’s (anti-depressants).
If you feel you need to take something to get through this process, absolutely take it. Don’t make a martyr or yourself. However, remember, these medications only temporarily mask the symptoms. Learning ways to relax and cope with the changes you’re undergoing works far better over the long haul than anything else.
I have provided various relaxation and breathing techniques on this, the anxiety and the panic boards that can be tremendously helpful. The one I’d recommend is something I refer to as “brown bagging it.” It’s in various places of the site, but I’ll give you a link to my article after I’ve finished this message.
It has been my experience and I believe that of many other women who’ve passed through Power Surge over the seven years it’s been online that once you are in the throes of perimenopause, for about one or two years — perhaps a third (but not often), you will experience every conceivable symptom on the list of 34+ symptoms (* see below). I went through severe migraines and was *never* a headache person in my life. They lasted about a year or two – on and off, not every day, but they eventually stopped. I went through the facial tremors, buzzing experience as though I’d had my finger in an electrical socket. The migraines and severe palpitations, hot flashes, night sweats, crying and severe mood swings, horrific depression so much so that at times I would put my head on the pillow at night and whisper to God, “Please, if I have to feel this way tomorrow, let me not wake up.”
Those feelings — horrible as they are — don’t generally last for the full transitional period. They usually occur during the worst phase of perimenopause and only last about a year or two. That doesn’t mean you won’t ever experience them again in some milder form, but the severity and frequency will certainly decrease — and hormone therapy isn’t the magical answer. Many women using hormones still experience many of these symptoms.
Just remember that as long as you’ve been given the okay regarding your health by your health care provider, these are symptoms of menopause and, yes, I say symptoms. People have said to me, “Why do you call them symptoms? Menopause isn’t an illness.”
I tell them that I know menopause isn’t technically an illness, but seeing as how I have never felt worse in my life, I will not say that I am well.
I get very passionate about this subject and one of the reasons I’ve kept Power Surge an independent entity is because it allows me the opportunity to express myself without wondering who’s going to pay the bills if I tell the truth about the medical profession and some of the techniques of the pharmaceutical companies.
I will never get rich from Power Surge, but knowing that this community has helped so many women understand what they’re going through without just dumping medical abstracts at them and pushing pills on them has been the most gratifying and “freeing” experience of my life.
Finally, let me add my favorite words — THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS. Believe me, I thought in my heart I would never, ever survive perimenopause, but the internal shaking eases up even though it’s hell while you’re going through it. The palps will stop as well. It just takes time and a LOT of patience!
Be good to your body and it will return the favor in spades.
For the “brown bagging it” reference and many other helpful suggestions, check out the Power Surge Menopause Survival Tips article.
…and the ever useful…
* The 34+ Signs of Menopause
Dearest”
Power Surge 