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View as: GRID LIST

Puberty’s evil big sister

1
I’ve been hot lately. Pretty much all the time. I started with all this hoo-ha about 18 months ago, but then it was just a few times a day. Recently I would do the school run in my bikini if I had no shame. Which I do. Shame surrounds me like a 15 tog duvet at the equator.

A friend of mine talks about the shame. Sitting in her office with a fan on while colleagues wear polo necks, feet on the radiator. It’s obvious to everyone why: she’s menopausal. But she would rather people didn’t know. Because the menopause is hilarious, isn’t it? Much

SelfishMother.com
2
comedy surrounds it, from the Golden Girls to Victoria Wood. And no woman wants to be seen as a figure of fun just because she has low levels of estrogen.

To be honest I hadn’t really clocked that it was happening, until I got a helpful book called ‘Understanding the Menopause and HRT’. Now I understand it better, and the main thing I’ve learnt is that out of 17 possible menopausal symptoms the book lists I have 16. Ok fine, I’m menopausal too.

Unable to cope any more with constantly shouting about being hot, sniping at my family for minor

SelfishMother.com
3
reasons, not being able to remember the name of anybody or anything, lying awake half the night worrying about random shit, aching in every possible muscle and occasionally feeling as though life isn’t worth living, I visited my GP. She’s always been a good doctor. Young, thorough, a good listener, and admittedly easy on the eye, she clearly knew not a jot about the menopause, and particularly about HRT, for which she wrote me a prescription and sent me on my way in about 4 seconds.

The idea is to wear a patch, like when trying to give up smoking,

SelfishMother.com
4
but with less self-congratulation. My depleted estrogen levels are replaced and I feel less like kicking people. I haven’t picked up the prescription yet, and I’m not 100% sure I will. Firstly I’m pretty sure the type of HRT she’s prescribed is entirely wrong for my early stage of feminine obsolescense. But there’s another reason.

The hormones. Reading the book takes me back to a time when they were a thing to study, follow, obey. Fifteen years back I began tracking my cycle like a broody bloodhound, and that only ended a couple of years

SelfishMother.com
5
ago. Trying to have a baby has been pretty much my hobby for most of my living memory.  We had one ten years ago, then we started the whole miserable business again. I’ve been pregnant four times. The last one, in 2012, ended with a general anaesthetic and an overnight stay in Whipps Cross.

But what all these far too familiar hormones really take me back to is the 3 failed rounds of IUI we had before the small one was born. Injecting myself daily until my belly looked like a flabby vascular dartboard. Feeling totally insane and loving it. This was

SelfishMother.com
6
a time when artificially introducing hormones into my body was exciting because it might lead to the one thing I wanted. It didn’t. He was conceived naturally later on. But reading about these beastly chemicals again makes me remember those times of hope and subsequent despair.

If I start to top up my body with these hormones once again now, at 48, it’s not for anything lovely. It’s just to stem the tide of advancing age, to help me deal with my fertility shutting down, to finally face the fact that there won’t be any more babies. That’s

SelfishMother.com
7
hard, but of course it’s true, and has been for some time.

This week the hot flushes have abated a little, and I feel a bit more like I’ve got both oars in the water. I’m reading the book to further inform myself so that I can inform my GP. It gives all sorts of good advice, including the fact that ‘anecdotally, women report that use of a fan can help’. Clever stuff. So here I sit with it whirring away, in my underwear, eating ice cubes, my ovaries coughing their last.

Don’t worry, I’m at home, alone.

 

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- 19 Mar 19

I’ve been hot lately. Pretty much all the time. I started with all this hoo-ha about 18 months ago, but then it was just a few times a day. Recently I would do the school run in my bikini if I had no shame. Which I do. Shame surrounds me like a 15 tog duvet at the equator.

A friend of mine talks about the shame. Sitting in her office with a fan on while colleagues wear polo necks, feet on the radiator. It’s obvious to everyone why: she’s menopausal. But she would rather people didn’t know. Because the menopause is hilarious, isn’t it? Much comedy surrounds it, from the Golden Girls to Victoria Wood. And no woman wants to be seen as a figure of fun just because she has low levels of estrogen.

To be honest I hadn’t really clocked that it was happening, until I got a helpful book called ‘Understanding the Menopause and HRT’. Now I understand it better, and the main thing I’ve learnt is that out of 17 possible menopausal symptoms the book lists I have 16. Ok fine, I’m menopausal too.

Unable to cope any more with constantly shouting about being hot, sniping at my family for minor reasons, not being able to remember the name of anybody or anything, lying awake half the night worrying about random shit, aching in every possible muscle and occasionally feeling as though life isn’t worth living, I visited my GP. She’s always been a good doctor. Young, thorough, a good listener, and admittedly easy on the eye, she clearly knew not a jot about the menopause, and particularly about HRT, for which she wrote me a prescription and sent me on my way in about 4 seconds.

The idea is to wear a patch, like when trying to give up smoking, but with less self-congratulation. My depleted estrogen levels are replaced and I feel less like kicking people. I haven’t picked up the prescription yet, and I’m not 100% sure I will. Firstly I’m pretty sure the type of HRT she’s prescribed is entirely wrong for my early stage of feminine obsolescense. But there’s another reason.

The hormones. Reading the book takes me back to a time when they were a thing to study, follow, obey. Fifteen years back I began tracking my cycle like a broody bloodhound, and that only ended a couple of years ago. Trying to have a baby has been pretty much my hobby for most of my living memory.  We had one ten years ago, then we started the whole miserable business again. I’ve been pregnant four times. The last one, in 2012, ended with a general anaesthetic and an overnight stay in Whipps Cross.

But what all these far too familiar hormones really take me back to is the 3 failed rounds of IUI we had before the small one was born. Injecting myself daily until my belly looked like a flabby vascular dartboard. Feeling totally insane and loving it. This was a time when artificially introducing hormones into my body was exciting because it might lead to the one thing I wanted. It didn’t. He was conceived naturally later on. But reading about these beastly chemicals again makes me remember those times of hope and subsequent despair.

If I start to top up my body with these hormones once again now, at 48, it’s not for anything lovely. It’s just to stem the tide of advancing age, to help me deal with my fertility shutting down, to finally face the fact that there won’t be any more babies. That’s hard, but of course it’s true, and has been for some time.

This week the hot flushes have abated a little, and I feel a bit more like I’ve got both oars in the water. I’m reading the book to further inform myself so that I can inform my GP. It gives all sorts of good advice, including the fact that ‘anecdotally, women report that use of a fan can help’. Clever stuff. So here I sit with it whirring away, in my underwear, eating ice cubes, my ovaries coughing their last.

Don’t worry, I’m at home, alone.

 

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