Suddenly and not a minute too soon
We are finally talking about the menopause, how it affects our day-to-day health and wellbeing, and our future health and wellbeing. As a Pilates teacher I’m super interested in how Pilates can help us as we navigate this life phase. I’m also educating myself about what else we can do to help with the symptoms and the longer-term effects that our plummeting hormones produce.
Perimenopause...
When perimenopause first hits us it can be like hitting a wall. For me it really was like that. A storm of symptoms throwing me off course. I found lots of things difficult, especially the mood swings including heart-broken crying, for no reason at all, notably when out to dinner in a beautiful beachside restaurant, with my new partner, Raoul. Luckily, he liked me a lot and stuck with me. (Reader, I married him) This week I mentioned to R that I was writing about that holiday in Portugal, and he finally told me how horrible I was to him back then. I made him admit that I must have some wonderful qualities too. Qualities that managed to shine through, despite the mood swings. I do remember feeling confused and desperate about the mood swings, highjacked by hormones- again.
Equally difficult was the unpredictability of my periods. The timing was suddenly more off than ever and the intensity almost unmanageable. In many ways it was like being a teenager again, but without the peer support and excitement.
Fantastic array of symptoms
My first visit to the doctor was to get some help for my newly frequent, heavy, and painful periods. It felt as if something was dreadfully wrong. I gathered from the doctor that this was nothing to worry about, just a symptom of perimenopause and the hormonal chaos now fighting it out inside me. The doctor was sympathetic and prescribed some medication to reduce the bleeding. The medication made me feel nauseous and very peculiar. So back to the doctor, who then offered me another medication to stop the nausea.
To me, taking a medication to reduce the symptoms of a medication you are taking to reduce symptoms seemed like a bad idea, what if I got side effects from the new medication? So, I stopped taking them both.
I was left managing the awful periods, the mood swings, the acne, and the fantastic array of new symptoms emerging. These included hot flashes, night sweats, weight gain but not just weight gain, weight gain that created innovative ways to store fat in places I hadn’t thought of before. I’ll come back to my attempts to master my new shape and what has finally helped me !
Lucky bones !
Still near the beginning of my perimenopause I re-read “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” by Christiane Northrup https://www.amazon.com/Womens-Bodies-Wisdom-Revised-Emotional/dp/0553386735
and began talking to some older women who were ahead of me on their voyage. They helped me to find a private doctor who would prescribe bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. HRT is back in fashion now, a dozen or so years later, which is a great thing from my point of view. However, at the time, pre 2010 the reasons you were allowed to take HRT were more strictly limited (in my experience in the UK) The flawed research linking HRT to breast cancer was holding sway. Luckily, in one way, it was discovered that I had very low bone density, at about 60% of where it should have been for my age. I was terrified but HRT was going to help save me, plus I would need more exercise and supplements. Gosh I felt squashed by that diagnosis.
Baked Bean Pie
Side note: the doctor suspected that as I had been at ballet school, training to dance during my adolescence, I was at a low weight during those crucial years and had not laid down the bone growth I should have done. I do remember being very hungry! Pretty unbelievable now but nutrition was not considered important or even considered. To add to that I was a vegetarian and I think the only one in the whole school when I arrived. An outlier. They really didn’t have a clue what to feed me. I had to walk from the dining room, along the empty and echoey subterranean corridors to the kitchens with my empty plate and pick up my piece of cheddar cheese for lunch and supper every day. One day the cook got very excited because she had invented a dish for me, Baked Bean Pie!
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Baffled then and now
I got HRT and managed to increase my bone density by 10% to 70% of where it should have been, over the course of a year. So that was good. However, the other symptoms continued and worsened. And new symptoms came. What I’m baffled by now is that the doctor never asked me about my many symptoms and never suggested altering the dose I was on.
I just thought that the HRT must be improving my symptoms and didn’t question if it could have helped more. After all my bone density was increasing and the big mood swings did improve but most other symptoms did not.
