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NABBW Columnist - Women in Transition
Menopause:
The Reality We all have to grapple with menopause, whether we had children at 28, at 40, or not at all, whether we worked or stayed at home, whether we’re straight or gay. No matter. We all go through it. Still, the first symptoms of perimenopause may come as a shock, no matter how primed we are to expect them. (A note on terminology: Hot flashes and other symptoms are actually part of perimenopause, or the period leading up to menopause; menopause is defined as the cessation of menstruation.) A friend of mine, a nurse-midwife, told me: “It took me by surprise because I had just stopped breast-feeding a baby the year before. There I was, 42, no period. I did a million pregnancy tests, and it never even occurred to me that it could be menopause. Finally I ran some lab tests and even after I saw the results, I still thought ‘this can’t be it.’” Some women breeze right through. My own mother, for example. All my life, she complained about one ailment or another. Rarely did she think of herself as a healthy woman (despite reality). Yet, when I asked her recently about her experience of “the change of life,” as she called it, she told me it had been no big deal. And a friend of mine told me, “I didn’t expect to have a lot of difficulty and I didn’t. I’ve had some hot flashes but they’re not intense. They’re mostly at night, or when I’m at the supermarket. There must be something about the air there.” Yet, much as it is with childbirth, few women have it so easy. Perimenopause is varied and individual. Some women are stunned by the severity and/or the duration of their symptoms. And in between the two extremes are many women who, to put it plainly, just feel lousy. There’s a broad and sometimes surprising array of possible symptoms. The reason is that estrogen plays many roles in our bodies, so the effects of dropping levels can take many forms. Although it’s rare for a woman to experience all of them, most of us are familiar with a few of the items on this list: Hot flashes, irregular or heavy bleeding, headaches, insomnia, heart palpitations, dizziness, incontinence, mental fogginess, night sweats, cold hands and feet, facial hair, hair loss, and acne. While all of the symptoms may be inconvenient or uncomfortable, some are truly wretched. Ruth, who I interviewed for my book, suffered from incontinence: “That’s the worst. If you truly want to feel old, if you want to feel just plain miserable, that will do it.” And symptoms that affect our sex lives, such as painful sex caused by vaginal thinning, drying or discomfort, and reduced (or nonexistent) sex drive also rank high on the misery index. More subtle but equally upsetting are intellectual and cognitive changes. We all – men included – have "senior moments" when we can't remember a name, or misplace our keys. But some women suffer more far-reaching memory loss, like frequently struggling to find the right word, or using words incorrectly. These symptoms can be truly unsettling because, lurking just underneath the surface, is our fear of the “A word,” or Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, we may have times when we simply feel fuzzy. I love the word coined for these occasions by Marlene, another woman I interviewed for my book: “mentalpause moments.” This mental fog may be the result of insomnia, another common symptom. Or says, gynecologist Ruth Steinberg, it may be something else: “I’m not sure how much is just being overwhelmed. Women are jugglers from the get-go – the house, the job, the kids. They always have multiple lists in their heads. If you add to that the many other midlife concerns, such as adolescent children and aging parents, I think the systems get overloaded.” Christiane Northrup, M.D., in The Wisdom of Menopause, writes that stress can aggravate hormonal imbalance. Then, menopausal symptoms, like hot flashes and insomnia, exacerbate our fatigue, tension and irritability. Many women talk about becoming highly emotional, as though they had an extreme version of PMS. The late novelist Carol Shields described her perimenopausal heroine’s feelings in Happenstance: “What did this mean, this new impatience, this seething reaction to petty irritations? It could get worse, she saw. You could become crippled by this kind of rage. It was all so wasteful in the long run. And what, she wondered, was the name of this new anger, this seismic sensitivity…” I think we know the answer. Speaking of answers, I’ll discuss treatments for perimenopause in my next column. Visit Karen at www.karenbaar.com. October
2005: Making Our Journeys Together
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Karen
Baar is a journalist specializing in health, and the author
of For My Next Act... Women Scripting Life After Fifty
(Rodale, 2004). In addition, she is the co-author of American
Indian Healing Arts (Bantam Books, 1999), The Circadian
Prescription (Putnam/Penguin, 2000) and Women and
Pain: Why It Hurts and What You Can Do (Hyperion, January
2002). She has written articles on health, fitness, nutrition
and alternative medicine for a variety of publications, including
The New York Times, Health, Cooking Light, Family Circle,
Self, Good Housekeeping, Natural Health, Parenting, Yale Medicine
and Columbia Public Health. National
Association of Baby Boomer Women Copyright
2005, National Association of Baby Boomer Women |