I have experienced the double whammy of weight gain – quitting smoking and entering full-blown menopause. Now, while just ‘eating less and moving more’ or ‘mindful eating’ might have worked when I was younger, at a certain age, losing weight gets harder and harder. I needed to do something more than simply count calories. In the… Read More
The only thing more talked about on women’s blogs than children is The Change. Somewhere around your fifties, you stop having your period and start having things that they call Symptoms. These are physical and psychological changes that seem to have the power to wreck lives and signal the start of a downward spiral into… Read More
You, who are approaching the end of your fertile years, hear the call of the sea.
You ache for the cool water to ease the hot blush on your face, to soften your dry elbows and erase the lines around your eyes.
How telling myself stories, which may or may not be true, has changed me.
The dreaded hot flushes are back. This is the third time I’ve been afflicted. The other two times they disappeared when my period came back.
I haven’t been to class since Friday. Having three days off is not what I planned. Saturday, raining and windy, was my allocated day off and I expected to be back in the hot room on Sunday. But then the last thing I imagined happened …
My period has disappeared again. It happened once before for three months and then it came back. I know it isn’t coming back any time soon because my boobs aren’t sore (PMT). But it seems that the price of smaller, happier breasts is the dreaded hot flushes. It is hard to explain how weird a… Read More
What amazes me is this connection with my body. When I was dieting, I tried so hard to ignore the biological impulse of hunger that I blocked everything else out.
So today I got the results of my blood test back from Thursday and my FSH is a whopping 50! Last Monday it was 10. So I am menopausal after all. The whole iron thing was a crock too — she says I must have “eaten something”.
I went to the doctor on Monday because I wasn’t sleeping. The hot flushes wake me up at least twice a night. As I have now missed two periods I self-diagnosed myself as having peri-menopause/menopause.
I sit in the small consulting room barely big enough for the massage table in the middle on a small green vinyl stool which looks like it came from my parents’ kitchen. On the other side of the room sits a Chinese man peering at me.
“It’s menopause,” I say, “I haven’t slept for two weeks because the hot flushes keep waking me up at night.”
So ladies, it appears that one month short of my 47th birthday I am heading into the unchartered territory of menopause (or peri-menopause to be precise). After two years of periods like clockwork after I gave up dieting, this month I skipped it.
